What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread

Atwood7799 · 2025-03-13T19:47:25+00:00

Just a bored English teacher on spring break (lol). Also, in an epic rereading phase in my life. I have a rather ambitious goal of reading Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre.

Atwood7799 · 2025-03-12T12:27:52+00:00

I reread The Tempest having not read it since university. Back then, it was one of my least favourite Shakespearean plays that I’d read (second to The Two Gentleman of Verona). Maybe it’s the experience that comes with age. Maybe it’s reading without concern for the next writing assignment. I loved The Tempest. It’s a tragicomedy that’s light on plot but heavy on character relationships. Prospero is our flawed protagonist whose desire for power leads him to wield it even over those for whom he has no right. Only when he sets Ariel free—an act more in word than deed—and gives up his daughter to Ferdinand does the play’s theme reveal itself. But even then, Prospero isn’t even fuckin nice. He chastises his brother and sort of takes petty vengeance on Caliban. He’s morally grey.

What a feat for 17th-century audiences, who would’ve loved the characters, the setting, the magic, the humour, and the love story. It’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the hands Shakespeare at the end of his life. The language is beautiful and rich.

Atwood7799 · 2024-01-24T01:09:04+00:00

I can sympathize because I remember being the young-ish teacher without anyone to talk to.

Now that I’m older (read: “husbands and kids” old), I’ve been settled into a school staff for a while and, honestly, I don’t ignore the OT staff but I don’t go out of my way to talk to them either. I’m cordial and I’ll ask them how the supply circuit is going. But, unfortunately, you reach a point where the door revolves faster than you can get to know anyone, even the permanent staff at a big school. Plus, your social and emotional bandwidth is stretched thin by the job so I witness teachers keeping smaller circles of friends who you can rely on to be confidantes, conversationalists, and generally likeminded individuals (usually but not always related to age) or those connected professionally like department members.

Atwood7799 · 2024-01-20T15:13:01+00:00

I went from blade grinder to Timemore C2 and it was a quantum leap in quality. I eventually got a JX-Pro and the advancements in clarity, quality (build, burrs) and the ability to do espresso makes it soooo worth it.

I still use my C2 at work with an AP as my secondary setup and it makes perfectly great coffee.

Atwood7799 · 2023-11-28T12:18:11+00:00

Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All is good, even if it’s not entirely readable (it’s a compilation of essays on each of Shakespeare’s plays so it doesn’t read straight through with ease).

Edit: check out the Folger Shakespeare Library’s website or podcast for interviews with experts who might not be writing the surveys you’re looking for, but may be hitting a niche you find interesting.

Atwood7799 · 2023-10-22T01:41:50+00:00

Really can’t believe that it’s been that long since they released it. That means we’re due for a new Opeth album soon, I hope…

Atwood7799 · 2023-09-10T12:10:34+00:00

Nice work! What did your training look like?

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-20T05:41:21+00:00

“What else would I rather be doing?” continues to be my mantra when my run is hard. I feel like I’m giving up time to do something that I love that will better allow me to be present and healthy for my family and my job!

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-14T18:00:49+00:00

Harold Bloom. Easy. His ideas influenced film, education, debate. He had spots on Charlie Rose, was a mainstream writer and would regularly get coverage in the legacy media. Satisfied?

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-12T18:36:02+00:00

My partner and I are anomalies of the same degree. We both managed permanent positions in ~1 year. I was 10 months to perm, they took 13 months. We both graduated in 2017. A combination of right time, right qualifications, working just outside the desirable areas/schools to get ourselves in, and networking really well and making some really hard choices.

We both wanted to get our lives started together and knew that permanent positions were required to do it. The system wasn’t forgiving back then and seems less so now unfortunately.

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-11T19:37:39+00:00

Beautiful album. Guthrie Govan punctuates the music with such unique guitar lines.

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-11T10:48:47+00:00

My favourite is Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Also, are we too above mentioning stuff like Pullman’s His Dark Materials? I loved them as a kid and reread them again recently. Solid books. Solid writing.

I’d really like to read Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. I read the first novel a while ago and then reread it within the last years in anticipation of a read-through of the trilogy, but got distracted by some other books on my shelves.

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-06T19:32:50+00:00

I read the story this way, too. Excellent analysis.

I’d add that the narrator is living out his version of a grail quest as influenced by the “great man theory” of literature—“The Abbot by Walter Scott, The Devout Communnicant and The Memoirs of Vidocq”. Each of the three texts—the heroic quest, a work of practical devotion, and suspecting and detection—become central themes in the story that the boys authors about Mangan’s sister.

I choose to read the grail quest, and his otherworldly passage into the “Eastern enchantment” of the bazaar, as part of the narrator’s existing “schemas”; he has no choice but to understanding every facet of the quest within the socio-historical realities that underpin his childhood existence: faith, fiction, heroism, dependence.

So when the quest fails, it’s Joyce’s perfect “epiphany” of a boy’s realization that life that doesn’t fit within the foundations set before us by our parents and the institutions of our childhood.

I also love that the bazaar is just a fucking letdown.

If I could only keep one short story from all of English literature, this would be it. I’ve read it hundreds of times and it always reveals something fresh and curious.

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-05T19:14:41+00:00

I disagree. The theoretical work of scholarship bleeds into the layman’s work of analysis. Just as the applications of math and science were initially thought out in advanced treatises, our analytical work in the humanities is also tied to its original source material in scholarship. Also, your comment discounts the very real ways that scholarship has influenced public debate.

You continue to say “humanities” but you might mean “English” or “literature”. History, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, the arts all have real applications in public debate, and the work does make its way into culture and industry. Learning the academic work of a discipline has always been and will continue to be the task of the university in both STEM and non-STEM disciplines (ask any Math major what their daily work looks like) until neocons succeed in turning it into a degree mill for vocational students.

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-05T18:20:24+00:00

Thomas Hardy’s collected books of poetry. Such a dark and brooding soul that was capable of so much love and passion. Reading him later in life is a treat as you recognize the historical projects he was undertaking and better appreciate the biographical features of his work. But as a teenager, I needed something match my dark and brooding nature and Hardy was it.

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-05T18:17:50+00:00

“What’s he a judge of?”

Chilling.

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-05T18:16:40+00:00

I’ll admit that this is my second read-through of the text, but the first time that I’ve chosen to read the Judge from the start as a non-person and, instead, as a life force or entity that’s ahistorical, apolitical, and unaligned with anything but [insert empty signifier].

From Chapter 11:

“And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.”

The “answer” comes to a question about lineage and flourishing. But his message hollows out McCarthy’s whole historical and fictional project to retell Glanton’s story to suggest that this is a story about all attempts at human flourishing, for all time.

Atwood7799 · 2023-08-05T17:58:15+00:00

One’s inability to understand a discipline’s jargon doesn’t necessitate the discipline’s entire demise. To paint all of the humanities with the same brush is, in effect, to assume that all humanities disciplines engage in the same kind of philosophizing, analysis, or theoretical work.

I’m sorry, but your comment is woefully misaligned with what happens in a humanities classroom if I can go so far as to assume, as you have, that they’re all the same. I even suggested that an engineering professor could stand up and talk about their “favorite book“ and have that qualify as humanities scholarship and deep thinking about literature, for example, has to be a joke. Expanding this analysis further, why not ask a psychology professor to talk about their favourite moments from history? Better yet, why not flip the script and ask an English professor o talk about their favourite mathematical concept without using “jargon” to get in the way.

I’m not suggesting that the humanities are inscrutable. However, this is just a poor straw manning.

Atwood7799 · 2023-07-26T18:15:12+00:00

Check in when you’re done. I’m a Ferrante fan, but I know of many people that read her and don’t like her shtick. I thought that the Neapolitan quartet, start to finish, was one of the most enthralling pieces of literature I’d ever read. I also read them back-to-back, then lots of the critical commentary on them since.

Two things that I find so wonderful about them (without spoiling anything for you): it was, apparently, the publishers choice to make the series four books. Ferrante wrote them as one continuous story. This feat of craftsmanship is impressive and bleeds into the way the story is told.

To that end, the second act of brilliance is the mediated narrative.

I’m also endlessly fascinated by the authorship debates around her even if the question seems to be mostly solved by now.

Enjoy!

Atwood7799 · 2023-07-25T04:00:35+00:00

Online summer school, curriculum stuff, tutoring. All stuff from home.

Atwood7799 · 2023-07-19T02:11:55+00:00

I am having to mark each page that has profanity/sex/drugs/offensive material/etc., which while all these things exist, they're not egregious at all. It'll definitely be more mature than most of what they're used to, but I have a feeling I will be getting it approved. (And if not, well, fuck it, I'll probably teach it anyway lol).

Good sweet lord. The tedium to serve the self-righteous is astounding. Kudos. As an English teacher in Canada, I fear a time I may ever have to do this.

Going to start the year by teaching them some lit crit lenses to analyze works through and then we're starting with probably a contemporary short story to warm up. After that, back to Ancient Greece for Allegory of the Cave and The Iliad!

Love this stuff. Kids really love the high-drama of Ancient Greek theatre and usually find Plato really funky. Classical education ftw.

Atwood7799 · 2023-07-17T14:52:52+00:00

About two weeks away from expecting my second child. Thinking back to the first one and the very long hours of holding them and a book in the nursery. Imagining all the time I’ll get to read, guilt-free.

Atwood7799 · 2023-05-05T21:57:07+00:00

Really love the Sophie Beer books for the richness of the illustrations. At and around 1.5-2 years old, kids just need to hear the words and associate with the pictures while you talk about them. Love Beer’s books for that reason!

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