{"id":2349,"date":"2025-10-24T10:29:03","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T10:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/?p=2349"},"modified":"2025-10-24T10:29:03","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T10:29:03","slug":"what-im-reading-now-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/?p=2349","title":{"rendered":"What I’m Reading Now"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A beautiful reflection by Departmental Lecturer Kate Longworth on her relationship with reading<\/em><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t realise until I sat down to write this how consuming, even dysfunctional, a relationship I have with reading and with books. I think about reading possibly more than anything else. Even eating. I currently have a bag of books in the boot of my car, waiting for my husband to be out of the house so that I can sneak them in unnoticed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m thinking about reading I\u2019m thinking about books that I have and books that I want, but I\u2019m also weighed down by how many books there are still to read. I\u2019m dividing books into shifting categories in my mind which only partly mirror the piles that exist around the house. There are a few piles in my office, at least one for each current academic and\/or creative project I have on the go, and others for books that made it from the boot to the office and which I haven\u2019t shelved yet. I move these books around a lot\u2014not necessarily as a function of having read them, often just as a way of sorting out how I feel about a project or just life in general. There is a pile on the landing, books from past lives that I can\u2019t bring myself to part with, but which somehow don\u2019t belong in my office. Then there are two piles on my bedside table, fiction and non-fiction. Just before bed is when I read for \u2018fun\u2019. I carry guilt in relation to reading for fun, though, as there\u2019s so much still to learn, so I also have an e-reader, which contains its own virtual piles of the crime novels I read to try to forget about the piles of books that surround me.<\/p>\n

Starting with crime, then, I think Mick Herron\u2019s new Slow Horses novel<\/a> contains his best writing to date. The textually sonic precision of Herron\u2019s prose style can\u2019t, in my opinion, be rendered on screen, so however good the TV show is, I\u2019d suggest not missing the books. I\u2019m planning a research article on Agatha Christie, and hers are making regular trips between the bedside table and two teetering piles in the office. I\u2019m planning to focus in the first instance on representations of adoption and the care system in Mrs McGinty\u2019s Dead<\/em>, Ordeal by Innocence<\/em> and The Mousetrap<\/em>. I think she\u2019s severely underrated as a prose stylist.<\/p>\n

I tend to read contemporary fiction on the e-reader, but sometimes books feel so important to me that I end up buying them in hard copy too. Banu Mushtaq\u2019s Heart Lamp<\/em><\/a> and Douglas Stuart\u2019s Shuggie Bain<\/em><\/a> have made that transition in the last month or so (from the personal I find myself dwelling a lot on what Stuart does to foreground a regional and working-class cadence). I\u2019m also working my way back through Elizabeth Bowen, currently The Last September<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

When I recently saw my own work categorised as \u2018intellectual history\u2019 I felt mingled overwhelm and laugh-out-loud-and-pinch-yourself gratitude. Richard Rorty wrote a brilliant essay<\/a> prizing this field as \u2018the story of the people who made splendid but largely unsuccessful attempts to ask the questions we ought to be asking.\u2019 There have been five books in the past year or so which have made me want to run around holding them aloft and pressing them on people. Our Creative Writing MSt students know my feelings about Questlove\u2019s historiographically magnificent Hip Hop Is History<\/em><\/a>\u2014it\u2019s difficult to think of a good reason not to read it. One of my cats is named after Charles Taylor, whose recent Cosmic Connections<\/em><\/a> is the second part of his joyfully surprising narrative of what humans try to do with language. As with Taylor, everything Simon Critchley writes makes me feel like I\u2019m being warmly welcomed into dialogue with some of the greatest minds in history, and I\u2019m happy to exercise a clich\u00e9 in insisting that his recent book on Tragedy<\/em><\/a> is a must-read. I was a few years late to Peter E Gordon\u2019s Continental Divide<\/em><\/a>, the story of a public conversation between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos, but now everything he writes is on pre-order. And I don\u2019t know how Bill Mander manages to make the narrative-arc-defying variance present within the story of British Idealism<\/a> so unputdownable. Incidentally, he offers a rare degree of insight into the wonderful TH Green<\/a>, an important figure in the history of Oxford\u2019s Lifelong Learning department (and the namesake of another of my cats).<\/p>\n

Poetry is always close by \u2013 Raymond Antrobus\u2019s<\/a> recent book is to hand, as well as the TS Eliot prize-nominated collection from course alum Isabelle Baafi<\/a>. I\u2019ll finish with something from a regularly revisited poet, Edna St Vincent Millay<\/a>, which sums up my relationship with my fortress of books:<\/p>\n

Siege<\/strong>

This I do, being mad:
Gather baubles about me,
Sit in a circle of toys, and all the time
Death beating the door in.

White jade and an orange pitcher,
Hindu idol, Chinese god,\u2014
Maybe next year, when I\u2019m richer\u2014
Carved beads and a lotus pod…<\/em>

And all this time
Death beating the door in.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A beautiful reflection by Departmental Lecturer Kate Longworth on her relationship with reading I didn\u2019t realise until I sat down to write this how consuming, even dysfunctional, a relationship I have with reading and with books. I think about reading possibly more than anything else. Even eating. I currently have a bag of books in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publications","category-tutor_news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p40Qhf-BT","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1214,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/?p=1214","url_meta":{"origin":2349,"position":0},"title":"Kellogg College Creative Writing Seminar Series: Prof Tabish Khair, 11th May 2017","author":"MSt Creative Writing","date":"April 14, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u201cThinking in Stories: Or why the process of reading literature is the antidote to fundamentalism\u201d Tabish Khair Mawby Room, Kellogg College, 62 Banbury Road 5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm All are welcome and no bookings are necessary Born and educated in Gaya, a small town in Bihar, India, Tabish\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Events"","block_context":{"text":"Events","link":"https:\/\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Tabish-Khair.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1068,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/?p=1068","url_meta":{"origin":2349,"position":1},"title":"MSt tutor Jamie Mckendrick and alumna Daisy Johnson on Guardian reads list","author":"MSt Creative Writing","date":"July 11, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"MSt tutor Jamie McKendrick (Selected Poems, recommended by William Boyd) and alumna Daisy Johnson (Fen, recommended by Sarah Perry) feature in The Guardian's The Best Books for Summer 2016 reading list. \u00a0 \u00a0","rel":"","context":"In "Alumni News"","block_context":{"text":"Alumni News","link":"https:\/\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/?cat=15"},"img":{"alt_text":"Screen Shot 2016-07-11 at 11.00.53","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Screen-Shot-2016-07-11-at-11.00.53-300x125.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":752,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/?p=752","url_meta":{"origin":2349,"position":2},"title":"Kellogg College Creative Writing Seminar Series: Belinda Jack, 14th May 2015","author":"MSt Creative Writing","date":"April 2, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"\u201cClich\u00e9: The Nemesis of Exciting Writing\u201d with Professor Belinda Jack Mawby Room, Kellogg College, 62 Banbury Road 5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm All are welcome and no bookings are necessary Writers need an acute attentiveness to language when reading, and a self-consciousness when writing, which together foster a creative\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Events"","block_context":{"text":"Events","link":"https:\/\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1608,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.conted.ox.ac.uk\/mstcw\/?p=1608","url_meta":{"origin":2349,"position":3},"title":"MSt tutor Jane Draycott reading at the British Library, 26 Nov 2018","author":"MSt Creative Writing","date":"November 25, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"MSt tutor Jane Draycott will be reading at the British Library on Monday 26 Nov 2018 for Carcanet's \"What makes a Classic?\" From the announcement: One generation\u2019s classics look quite different from another\u2019s. 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