Stratofanatic's Emporium

Random e-mail of the day -- got a message from a literature student in Pakistan, who loves Tolkien, asking for some cheaply available Tolkien books. Apparently, as might be expected, Pakistan doesn't have a whole lot of Tolkien stuff there. Well, sadly, I had to tell the fellow that, even if I had access to some cheap Tolkien books, shipping them halfway around the globe would have been prohibitively expensive. Still, I managed to directed him to the open access Journal of Tolkien Research and academia.edu, which has lots of free Tolkien stuff. Good luck to the guy. . . .

Just completed my second essay on Stephen R. Donaldson and gender violence. (The first was "revise and resubmit," and my subsequent revision is now under renewed consideration.) This second essay focuses on "Reave the Just" from SRD's Reave the Just and Other Tales . It was, in fact, the conference paper I presented at ICFA 2017 , although this version is double in length and oozing with secondary material. Still, I'm a bit unsure . . . I'm pretty confident that the close reading and analysis is top notch, of course, but I'm not sure what reviewers might think of my ultimate conclusions. Thus I'll be sending this sucker out drastically unsure of its fate. Of course, for me, surety isn't all that sure . . . I've send out articles that I believed were the cat's meow, and sometimes they've been accepted-with-no-revisions, and sometimes. . .  well!  So we'll just have to see how this goes.

Well, my fiction reading list for the first half of the year can be found here . Seems like my second half managed to be depressingly less productive than the first, but oh well. As usual, I'm not including my non-fiction / lit crit reading . . . all that's too hodgepodge for accurate counts. Hanif Kurieshi, The Black Album, 250 pg Hanif Kurieshi, Intimacy , 150 pg. Kazuo Ishiguru, The Buried Giant , 200 pg (uncompleted) Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies , 400 pg. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith , 600 pg. Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger, 500 pg. Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members, 150 pg  Zadie Smith, White Teeth, 550 pg Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Shattered Chain , 300 pg. Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sharra's Exile , 350 pg. Marion Zimmer Bradley, Thendara House , 400 pg. Stephen R. Donaldson, Lord Foul's Bane , 400 pg. Stephen R. Donaldson, The Illearth War , 550 pg. Stephen R. Donaldson, The Power that Preserves , 450 pg. Stephen R. ...

Academic novels are something of a hobby of mine. . . . but I thinking the following, Trigger Warning , is one that might not make my Christmas wish list this year. It's basically every radical right-wing conspiracy theory about universities combined into one book. Here's the Chronicle's summation: here .