November 2024 Reading Roundup

Dear readers,

You are not seeing that image wrong, and The StoryGraph did not glitch when it pulled the books I finished in November and made the pretty graphic. I finished reading one (1) book last month, and it was a book on literary criticism, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies by Jonathan Kramnick.

The Wingback is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I was, of course, reading all month long. I had a stack of magazines to catch up on - The Point, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, Tricycle, and Bookforum were all waiting for me.

I’m also reading Tata by Valérie Perrin, which just came out in France in September. It’s a 600-page doorstop of a book, but her novels are engrossing. I read Changer l’eau des fleurs (Fresh Water for Flowers) a couple of years ago and highly recommend it too. (If you read in French, I also recommend FrenchBooksOnline.com. I have nothing to do with the site, and it’s not an affiliate link. I’ve been buying books from this online shop for years, and they’re great.)

And I’m reading Ralentir ou périr, a book about economic degrowth by Timothée Parrique. If you want to give it a go, it’s apparently coming out in English in May 2025 from Europa: Slow Down or Die (the link is a preorder). It’s a far easier read than it sounds, with plenty of real-world examples to make the statistics comprehensible.

What I was really reading, though, and reading and reading and rereading and rereading, were physical books, ebooks, and PDF articles for my master’s thesis in English. I finished the lastest draft yesterday, December 1, and will begin reading the printout in preparation for the next draft tonight before dinner. I’ve been working on this in some form for more than a year, and intensely—nearly every day, including weekends—since June. I am very ready to be done, even though I still find the topic, a medieval text called Ancrene Wisse, endlessly interesting. I’ll be turning in my revised version to my thesis director at the end of the year, and we’ll do a few rounds of edits together before the whole paper is officially turned in to Harvard this spring.

You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop. Links to books in this newsletter are affiliate links, so clicking and buying helps support KHG and The Wingback.