No Umineko this week because I’ve been huddled in a ball weeping finishing up my final papers, but y’all are apparently more interested in dry books about other books than I thought, so here’s some of my favorite stuff I read for research this past semester!
edit: Fuck, I forgot one! Read everything Ayanna Thompson has ever written about Othello, especially her introduction to the Arden edition of the play.
I don’t typically talk about all the academic books I read here (though… is that something people want?), but I bought this for a research project a month ago and I’m still irritated about it so I’m unloading on you instead of poor Mr. Act, who has his own shit going on.
This post is really a lesson about due diligence and the necessity of academic presses, for all their flaws.
This one needs some context:
My final project for one of my classes this semester was an annotated bibliography of recent critical works I thought were useful, so I basically wrote a quickpost in Academese for my final paper I thought I’d pass on to you. It’s ten books, 8 of which have not appeared here before, and a bunch of them are definite recs (some of them, not so much), so it should be useful! Well, I hope. I got an A in the class, so it was useful to me.
I also left on my summary at the end, which was meant to be something of a personal critical statement, which I thought might be relevant in some way to people who are interested in why I talk about what I do.
These are in pub order, because for some unfathomable reason my professor wanted it that way.
While I won’t list all the titles and authors here, I will do a special-rec callout of Literary Witches, which I had a surprisingly strong emotional reaction to. I actually ended up writing another piece about it for this course as well.
I haven’t made any edits here, so prepare for JARGON.
Been a while since I did a pop novel, but I found I had a lot of thoughts about this one that I wanted to compile, and then I figured I may as well force them on you.
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a spectacularly written work of historical fiction about the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s that functions primarily as a class commentary. Adichie’s prose is the best I’ve encountered in a long time. Unfortunately it has some pretty significant misogyny issues, and I was surprised by how toothless the racial commentary was.
Also, if anyone has read Americanah (Adichie’s latest novel) I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on it. It being primarily a romance doesn’t really appeal to me so I got Yellow Sun, but I’m willing to believe the strength of Adichie’s writing could carry even something boring.
Warning for lots of rape.
Andrej Sapkowski has definitely become one of my favorite fantasy writers, but he’s also blindsided me by becoming my favorite romance writer. This series is just a constant feelsfest.