What I’ve been reading

1. Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading the Faerie Queene.  A splendid book, take the title literally, and I very much liked these two sentences: “Others, however, pick it [Faerie Queene] up on impulse and find themselves helplessly enthralled, spurred by a devotion at once unsustainable and impossible to shake.  As C.S. Lewis put it, “I never meet a man who says that he used to like the Faerie Queene.”  Could it be the most underrated book of the Western canon?

2. Sophocles, Oedipus Trilogy, translated by Bryan Doerries.  I cannot judge the fidelity of the rendering into English, but it is the most readable translation of these works I have encountered and they are always worth a reread.

3. Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism.  One of the best books on autism, perhaps the best book on female autistics, and the best book on intersectionality I have read (out of few, to be clear).  Pithy and direct: “Eager to discover other women who had been misunderstood in their time, she writes a series of wide-ranging letters to four ‘weird sisters’ from history, addressing topics including autistic parenting, social isolation, feminism, the movement for disability rights and the appalling punishments that have been meted out over centuries to those deemed to fall short of the norm.”