reading (notes)

Okay, so I want to get back to reading, but feel so paralyzed in a way, how infinite it all is, when you're not so focused closely on one project. I'm feeling drawn lately to delicious gothic interiors by women writers - Jackie W. recommended The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns after she read Green Girl, and I also want to read Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which Danielle D. at the Dorothy Project recently republished. I want to go back to Caroline Blackwood's novels, Jean Stafford's, both published by the NYRB, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers. Maybe also Herta Muller? (What Herta Muller should I read?) Some of these authors/books are kind of comingling for me into an essay on the South and the grotesque and illness and writing the body, although part of me doesn't know whether I should issue a personal ban on essay-writing, as I'm still fact-checking Heroines (it's taking me like a half-hour to fact-check one page, part puppy, part puppy brain, part the slowness of such an endeavor). Or: maybe: I should just read to be a reader, for the pleasure and stimulation of it. What a fucking novel idea.