What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was a reread of Carol Ann Duffy’s Standing Female Nude collection of poetry, which was… okay. There are some standouts in it, like “War Photographer”, but there are also some poems that I find impenetrable or just silly.

I wasn’t too surprised, since it wasn’t my favourite of her collections when I originally read it, but it was a nice revisit all the same for the ones I did enjoy.

What are you currently reading?

Oh, way, way too many things at once. I interpreted the impending end of my exams (combined with the stress of the exam period) as licence to dive into a gazillion books at the same time, apparently. So I’ll keep it to my main read, the one I have actually picked up in the last 24 hours: I’m a good chunk of the way into John Bradshaw’s The Animals Among Us, which is a few years old now and discusses the science of human interactions with pets. You know the assertions that having a dog makes you healthier, pets are good co-therapists, and even that having pets as a kid helps guard against allergies? Allll of that stuff.

It’s not really my field except where he discusses microbes, of course, and sometimes there’s no citation where I really want there to be one. Sometimes it doesn’t “obviously follow that”, unless that’s what you already believe. Still, it’s a fun change from my usual topics, and adjacent enough to give me some chance at evaluating some of what he says.

What will you be reading next?

The sky’s the limit, really! But I did join the StoryGraph mirror of Goodreads’ “seasonal challenge”, just for fun, so… probably one of the books I picked for that! Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent, probably, but maybe Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man.

And of course some danmei, soon, soon: I still have volume one of The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish ready and waiting, a reread of The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System in progress, and a copy of the first volume of Guardian on the way…