Linking up with Taking On A World of Words.
What have you recently finished reading?
I finally got round to finishing Kate Strasdin’s Dressing the Queen! I enjoyed it a lot: it doesn’t actually focus on the various royal women it references, but on the craftspeople who created their clothes and accessories, repaired them, laundered them, sorted them, packed them for journeys, etc. Sometimes there’s not a lot of information out there, but Strasdin did a pretty good job of pulling together what there is, I think.
What are you currently reading?
I still have a ridiculous stack of books I’m supposedly partway through, but I did a bit of reorganising and paused some that I wasn’t really getting anywhere with, so I’m hoping to feel a biiiit more in control and less overwhelmed with that. So I’ll just talk about the two I’ve picked up in the last two days!
First, a random pick that I’d added via Kobo Plus at some point: Marilyn Johnson’s The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, which is mostly a deep dive into the lives and thoughts of obituarists she admires, with examples of their work and how it influence obituaries as a form. I’m getting a little bored with it now, but it has been a mostly interesting read.
I also started a book I put on hold at the library and forgot about until it actually came in, Brian Bilston’s How to Lay An Egg with a Horse Inside, which is about writing and enjoying poetry (and by enjoying poetry, so far it mostly means the process of writing it). I know nothing about Bilston and only realised I’d read one of his poems (“On â;..p'[[[[[[[[[[[[[;â;////////////////////////3,â“, about his cat’s “poetry”) when he included it here. It’s a mostly tongue-in-cheek musing on poetry that so far has offered nothing new or insightful as far as writing or enjoying poetry goes, but it’s mildly entertaining and I will probably finish in it.
What will you be reading next?
Not a clue, but volume two of Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain is a possibility, as is finally getting round to Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint vol 3. We’ll see — at the moment it’s pretty much whatever gets me reading, so I might also dip into the randomness of the books that turned out to be available on Kobo Plus, got added to my Kobo, and haven’t been thought of since.
