All Very Interesting

I'm in that odd state of mind in which everything I read is really interesting. It's a good place to be, but it means that it takes a while to actually finish anything since that anything demands slow reading and painstaking attentiveness.

Case in point: I'm only about a third of the way through the Christmas Double Issue of the Literary Review from 2023, despite it having resided on the shelf for mags since late January. And every article so far has exercised its fascination. Here's the sequence of topics, if you're interested in what I find interesting: the rulers of the 'princely states' of India in the 20th century ⇒ history of Renaissance paintings ⇒ Oliver Cromwell, his writing ⇒ the doctrine of papal infallibility, and how it got started ⇒ how 'ordinary' Germans functioned as bystanders in the Holocaust ⇒ the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya ⇒ the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz ⇒ J.G. Ballard's non-fiction ⇒ elegiac poetry written in English ⇒ a practical joke played by the writer Virginia Woolf & some of her cronies ⇒ the fraudster and forger (of books) Thomas James Wise ⇒ the development of the female body in evolutionary terms ⇒ how twins are regarded across various cultures, and periods of history.

I suppose I sound quite learned in referencing the above. But the opposite is the case. It's all stuff I'd like to know a lot more about but can only get a taste of.