Readsday!

A friend of mine came up with that title, which I find delightful, since if you miss Wednesday that's okay, and another friend switched the order of the first and second questions so they're actually easier to answer.....other people were talking about basically making this recurring post a snapshot of the books you're reading right now, as opposed to feeling obligated to write up capsule reviews of everything you've read during the week (with me, this is usually three to five books) or even full-length reviews of two or more books every week -- which, no. (Altho a lot of people doing this -- me included -- were hoping this would push them into more regular book-reviewing again, which, also no.)

So: Readsday.


What did you just finish reading?
I just came off being sick, and then the migraine moved in for a Surprise Flank Attack (apparently triggered by a BPAL perfume called, wait for it.....Our Lady of Pain ((NO LAUGHING)) ((okay, go ahead, it's funny)) ) which meant yesterday was lost to head pain and severe nausea, and today might very well be too. Migraines: you go with the riptide. A friend who suffers much worse migraines (and also had to be weaned off Perks by her doctor, FUN) has tried out every chronic pain clinic in the country, just about, and I admit it's still hard for me to think of migraines that way: they're "just" oh yeah those crippling headaches that make it impossible to go to school or work or write or even read much that happen a couple of times a month. Thank you, Christian Science upbringing. Vitamin I(buprofen), you are my favourite.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying I did nothing much but comfort-reread Terry Pratchett. Witches Abroad, Thud, Hogfather, Lords and Ladies, Wyrd Sisters, Going Postal, all old favourites that never let me down. I even reread Witches Abroad twice. I tried some not-new-to-me Pratchetts I haven't reread in some years, too: Feet of Clay, Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, and one I had apparently just skipped over entirely, The Fifth Elephant. They were.....okay. I'm now at the point where I'm starting to notice not just repeated plot points and characterizations but actual phrases (for some reason he's fond of a "perfect chrysanthemum" of soot appearing on walls after a small explosion), so I better find something else. ....hmmm, maybe Hound of the Baskervilles or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, those are old sickbed friends. I've been eyeing The Italian Secretary, but....I d'know.

What are you reading now?
Not exactly reading it, but looking at The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, which just arrived and is mainly reminding me how awkward I find High Academese to just read. The disappearing of middlebrow lit journals and little magazines has also meant that there's now nothing much in between the desperate-to-be-hip slanginess of book blogs and academia (which is itself endangered) (I can't be too broken up about that). Just once I would like to read a book of critical theory without names like Derrida and Irigaray and Cixous and Foucault (Foucault! can't he just be taken down by a pack of feral neopragmatists like the Stephens Island Wren? Or maybe that happened already, and his spectre is doomed to haunt the powers of Old Europe, forever) being tossed into the mix like so much post-structuralist flavouring.  Just once. "Remember, fledgling critics, you can always add more salt Lévi-Strauss, but you can't ever take him out."

What do you expect to read next?
.....I really have no idea, it's hard to focus (no, I can't take heavy-duty painkillers, thanks for asking). I might go back to bed. I might read The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland, which just arrived, except something that unrelentingly twee might stun me in my weakened state, or kill even more brain cells than a migraine. Maybe after a nap.

-- Wow, migraines seem to encourage profusions of parentheses.