This thread will now only be updated on Bluesky. Thanks everyone, I’ve loved my time here but between the enshittification of the app and the owner’s viciousness it’s time to leave.

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The next book was RF Kuang’s fantasy dark academia novel, Babel. Oxford University is complicit in the British Empire’s brutal exploitation; only a small group of foreign scholars can stop it. Liked the militancy; didn’t like the constant hammering home of the point. Way too long

Followed that with Richard Owain Roberts’ Hello Friend We Missed You, which popped up in a PhD I examined recently. A grieving, listless widower fiddles with his phone while waiting for his father to die. Striking style - totally devoid of adjectives.

…all the more effective for being a beautiful, detailed evocation of 1990s small-town Montana. Realism at its best.

Actually managed a book for pleasure this weekend: Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. An orphaned girl’s emergent lesbianism in an increasingly evangelical town leads to her banishment to a conversion camp. An effective evocation of psychological harm…

Also read this week: a draft book on feminist copyright law theory and a PhD draft on international patent law and non-communicable diseases. My contribution was deleting 838 commas and suggesting some top-quality gags (rejected).

miscarriage isn’t mentioned on the cover. It’s smart, witty and depressing at the same time. I’m sorry, 20-something academic women. We’ve really messed things up for you.

…lecturer whose attempts to achieve mental stability are subverted by online discourse destroying her ability to think confidently, and her ongoing miscarriage dragging her back to the unironic corporeal almost constantly. Weirdly (not) the detailed representation of the….

Last week I was the internal examiner for a PhD on literary representations or no consciousness. The only novel I hadn’t read was Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind, so I got a copy. It’s the simultaneously hilarious and depressing story of a precariously-employed English

Latest read was a return to an old favourite: today I taught David Garnett’s wonderful modernist fable, Lady Into Fox, in which her husband struggles to adapt to his wife (probably) changing into the aforesaid animal.

I have finally managed a non-work book: Melinda Taub’s The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch. Very funny, a decent stab at Austen’s register, very inventive. All in all a decent YA adventure. Not going on my Austen module because it can’t all be P and P retellings.

Still no time for sustained reading but I finished my latest Lavatory Book: The Railway Station, a Social History (1988). A bit dated, slightly blokey but a passionate exploration of railways as agents of empire, racism, economic development, architecture and culture. Wonderful

No time for non-work reading for the last week or so. I have read The White Devil, Leonora Carrington’s short stories (briskly unpleasant in a good way) and Jean Toomer’s Cane though. The latter is part masterpiece, part cranky, all fascinating.

RT @HywelCymru: Newyddion tristaf heddiw gyda Geraint Jarman yn ein gadael ni. Bardd, cyfansoddwr a cherddor hollol arloesol ac ysbrydoliae….

Damned auto-correct apparently doesn’t know the word ‘ekphrastic’.

Latest read was Oliver Langmead’s Calypso. Astonishing generation ship SF owing much to Homer and Milton, and in (sometimes emphatic) verse. Brilliant.

RT @RobLooseCannon: RIP Pat Ingoldsby: A children's television presenter, published author, d.j, journalist, and a Dublin institution. Pat….

I didn’t know Today was a news programme. I thought it was just podcast adverts interspersed with the weather.

In common with so many universities including mine that used to promote aspiration in their communities, they want to herd working-class students into vocational work and vocational work only. No poetry for the plebs!.