Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, yeah, this is my first (and only) fiction reading list update for 2021. Normally, I read enough that I break the year  into two halves, but that wasn't practical this time around. Oh, not because of how awful 2021 was, since it wasn't, but mostly because I exclude academic titles from these productivity lists, and academic reading seems to have monopolized my time this year -- a product of all the research I did on the anthology. The end result is a very  un impressive fiction reading list for the 2021. In fact my fiction reading has been so sparse of late, I deliberately volunteered to review a biography of John Wyndham, a writer I'd never heard of, just to force myself to read more fiction books as research. ... and ended up loving Wyndham, by the way. FINAL STATS FOR 2021 : 6,155 pages (or 31 books) over 365 days,  which averages out to about 17 pages per day. For reference, last year in 2020 -- the real year of the pandemic -- I read over 16,000 pages of fiction. ...

Here's something cool by Contingent Magazine .... a list of books and articles  published in 2021 by non-tenure-track literary scholars. (There's a distressing number of us, alas.) Because of the unbearable slowness of academic publishing, I had a relatively ridiculous seven (!) peer-reviewed articles come out in 2021 -- not to mention 2 non-peer-reviewed articles and one book review, but I didn't bother including those. Overall, it's been a wonderful publishing year, and something of a mental relief to have my insane backlog of academic scholarship taken out of publication limbo.  Still, the high number of quality monographs from fancy university presses by contingent scholars is, I think, a source of legitimate despair for the future of academia.

Well, here come a new minor publication from The Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching  ... it's a short personal narrative about what teaching during the pandemic taught me, and written to be as accessible as possible to all audiences. It's called " GoogleDocs and Zoom: A Love Story ." Not a very important publication in the grand scheme of things, but it was a short quick write -- basically did it over a few days when I was on a five-day holiday in California with a few friends last June.

As one does, I found myself suddenly in desperate need of knowing when, how, and if Old English folk dropped their 'aitches. And, while researching this question, I came across this line of text from a O.E. grammar book from 1922 (specifically, E. E. Wardale's An Old English Grammar ): "Note:--It will be observed that the loss of h was later than Breaking." Except that I know no idea what this "Breaking" -- with capital letter! -- means, nor does the one medievalist friend with whom I consulted. And this is where my familiarity with epic fantasy is maybe causing some issues, cuz now I keep thinking, "Oh wait, does she mean when the Dark One helped cause the Breaking of the World?"