Recent reading

Read The Ghost Road by Pat Barker, the third book in her Regeneration trilogy; I read the first book last year, but finally just skipped ahead because my library doesn't have the second. Set in the last months of WWI, the novel's focus is split between (fictional) officer Billy Prior and (real) psychiatrist William Rivers, who in Regeneration had been, respectively, patient and doctor at the (real) Craiglockhart hospital for shellshocked soldiers. Much of Rivers' half of the narrative consists of flashbacks to his time as an anthropologist in the Solomon Islands, and in the second half of the book, Prior's narrative takes the form of journal entries as he returns to the war. As the chapters alternate between their POVs, it's impossible to shake the knowledge that the dates in Prior's journal tick ever closer to Armistice— will he make it?— even as Rivers' flashbacks depict a world far removed from the characters' present.

I've also been following along with Re: Dracula, aka Dracula Daily: The Podcast. I'm finding Jonathan's experiences as Dracula's lawyer guest hostage even spookier in audio format— the voice acting and sound editing really makes it! (Speaking of voice acting: it has Jonathan Sims as Jack Seward!) It also occasionally releases bonus episodes discussing, e.g., most recently, Victorian Class and Gender and how that plays out in Dracula.