Amongst all the horrors I am happy to announce that I submitted my PhD thesis yesterday evening at approximately 5:30pm. She weighed in at about 200 pages and 80,000 words xxxxxxx

Update from this past weekend

And then last but not least, my holiday beach reading that has concerned my whole family: The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. I have meant to read this for years! A week of saying “so I’m reading this book about loneliness—“ ended only yesterday. Will likely not finish another book before the new year.

Then continuing my fantasy bullshit, the second book in the ninth house series by Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent.

Alongside everyone else I also read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and sorry to announce that I am a verified card carrying Rooney lover and this latest book simply confirms this yet again. I have hotter takes about this one specifically that I will save for friends at the pub and not social media

Alternating long books with little ones, I moved on to Andrea Long Chu’s Females, which was as irreverent and gutsy and funny and harsh as I would have expected.

I then (again unofficially via erstwhile bookclub friends) read Butter by Asako Yuzuki. Friends were worried that the depth of detail in the culinary descriptions would offend my vegan sensibilities, but it was really tasty!! Also food bringing everyone together in the end??? I perhaps cried

Back in my FANTASY shit now, I greatly enjoyed the chunky Perilous Times by Thomas D. Lee. Arthuriana and ecoterrorism and climate breakdown and dragons? You can fit it all in here and haul it across country

Back on my sci-fi shit, I (re)read The Word for World is Forest (for the first time since like high school?)
Anyway I love Ursula Le Guin!

Another one that I read because I as teaching it: Larissa Behrendt’s After Story. There is something very comforting about the way that people use literature to process hard times — a great example of that.

I (re)read Northanger Abbey because I had to teach Northanger Abbey (still counts!) One of the nicer things about reading it this time around was seeing students read it for the first time, meet Catherine, encounter Austen in a new way. Banger.

I read R. F Kuang’s Yellowface with my erstwhile bookclub (will we ever reconvene?? Who knows). I remember enjoying it but I do often find books about authors to be a hard sell for my tastebuds. I do however love books about bad people making bad choices so it evens out.

Then I read Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein, which was very funny and sad and enlightening. I think everyone I know has either read this book or heard me talk about it so I’m preaching to the choir.

Then I read this little gem by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. My favourite part of this was probably the richness and strangeness of ancient societies and far-future societies all described with the same kind of radical awe, so you were never quite sure when you were looking at something.

First book of the year was Eileen by Odessa Moshfegh, which I read partly bc I saw the trailer for the movie and wanted to read the book before I saw it (and then I never saw the movie). I really liked it! Pretty wild!

My father asks the hard hitting questions

I’m just a girl who loves water pageantry