A Blogroll for the Avid Reader

In a world where searching is increasingly awful, I decided to replicate some of the early web patterns: a listing of blog favorites. I wanted to share multiple avenues to rewarding writing on topics near and dear to my heart. Bonus, most of these have RSS feeds, if you still live in that part of the internet. (Better than doomscrolling, amiright?!)

By all means, suggest other discoveries in the comments.

NUNS, BOOKS, WOMEN, AND MATERIAL THINGS

Medingen Manuscripts — https://medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk/  

A research blog from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, devoted to late medieval convent manuscripts, prayer books, women’s religious life, liturgy, materiality, and the effects of the Reformation on religious communities. Especially good if you like manuscripts attached to actual historical women!

History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland — https://historyofwomenreligious.org/  

A broad hub for the history of women religious from the medieval period onward: conferences, reviews, research resources, notices, and new scholarship. Their bibliography is particularly useful if you need somewhere sensible to begin (or are chasing that elusive memory fragment of that thing you read three years ago...)

Early Modern Female Book Ownership / #HerBook — https://earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com/

Books that once belonged to women are the point here: inscriptions, handwriting, reading practices, ownership marks, textual self-presentation, and books that have since wandered off into libraries and private collections. A wonderful site for anyone who likes evidence left in the margins.

Feminist Histories — https://feministhistories.substack.com/

Natalie Donnell writes long-form archival history about women exercising their political, diplomatic, familial, and economic power in early modern Europe. Well researched, very readable, and full of women who turn out to have been doing rather more than the standard narratives allow.

Free Range History — https://freerangehistory.substack.com/

Amy Freeborn writes “stories from the past, driven by curiosity and wonder,” which is a pretty good description of the appeal. Broad-ranging, approachable history that follows an interesting question wherever it leads.

Feminist History of Philosophy — https://feministhistoryofphilosophy.wordpress.com/

Sandrine Berges looks at philosophy with the women put back in. Expect forgotten thinkers, arguments about canon formation, and a more gender-inclusive history of ideas than the one many of us were originally taught.

Early Modern Fashion and Material Culture — https://sarahabendall.com/blog/

Sarah Bendall writes sharply and often wittily about clothing, objects, labor, bodies, and material life in the early modern world. Come for court dress and textiles; stay for the reminder that clothes are historical evidence too.

MUSICOLOGY

Songs of Sunrise — https://leahbroad.substack.com/

Leah Broad’s delightfully written “music newsletter for inquisitive listeners.” Music history, women musicians, biography, archives, listening, and the larger cultural stories that make repertories matter.

Musicology, Medieval to Modern — https://eeleach.blog/blog/

Elizabeth Eva Leach writes across medieval music, manuscripts, gender, research, publications, and the occasional realities of academic life. Especially rewarding if your tastes run toward manuscripts and medieval song.

Karen McAulay, Musicologist — https://karenmcaulaymusicologist.blog/

Karen McAulay writes about Scottish music collecting, publishing, national identity, women musicians, archives, and the wonderfully winding paths research can take. Part research diary, part musical history, with plenty of curiosity, useful discoveries, and the occasional irresistible archival rabbit hole.  

Words on Music — https://wordsonmusic.substack.com/

Rebecca Franks calls this “a place to explore the art of writing about music.” Smart, vivid prose on listening, performance, books, criticism, and what makes music worth writing about in the first place.

Twangle: Music and Words — https://jessicaduchen.substack.com/

Jessica Duchen comes at things more as critic and journalist than academic musicologist, but she has a delightful way with words. Music history, biography, women musicians, performance, current classical culture, and the occasional personal detour all turn up here.

LARGER-SCALE MUSICOLOGY

Musicology Now — https://musicologynow.org/

The American Musicological Society’s public-facing platform for “sounds, words, and ideas.” A useful place to see what musicologists are thinking about beyond journal articles: archives, listening, race, gender, technology, repertory, performance, and so on.

Sounding Out! — https://soundstudiesblog.com/

“Pushing sound studies into the red since 2009,” and still doing it. Essays on sound, listening, voice, race, gender, media, technology, embodiment, and culture, usually with more energy than the phrase “interdisciplinary sound studies” has a right to suggest.

RILM Bibliolore — https://bibliolore.org/

Musicology produces an astonishing amount of bibliography; Bibliolore picks out nuggets to share. Expect discoveries, anniversaries, books, archival curiosities, international scholarship, and other delightful oddities.

Musicological Brainfood — https://www.musicology.org/brainfood/

The International Musicological Society’s series of short provocations and “amuse-bouches” from the field. Good for testing new ideas, spotting emerging conversations, and encountering perspectives well beyond one national or disciplinary corner of musicology.

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You might also be interested in...

Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg), in which a Soundscape article made me think differently about all those uphill climbs I took in Austria -- and their sound implications.

Musical Presence and Funeral Choices, where Brian Fairley’s work on recorded singing in Soviet Georgia (in which you could sing at your own funeral!!!) opened up much bigger questions for me about family memory, technology, musical presence, and what it means to leave a voice behind.

Supple Rules for Prayer: Daston’s Ideas Meet the 16thc Prayerbook; I found that Lorraine Daston’s Rules gave me a new way to think about prayerbook rubrics: not merely as instructions or choreography, but as “supple rules” for practiced devotion. What happens when we treat prayer as a craft learned through repetition, judgment, bodily habit, and use?

General Maxims, Cynthia Style

Every so often, my brain likes to parse out the habits I live by as a set of small working principles. These aren’t grand philosophy, exactly, nor advice in any stern sense. They’re more like rules of thumb, tested out by daily practices: walking, writing, reading, birding before breakfast, coffee, and the recurring need to do the unlovely task before breakfast. Here are twenty of them. 

1. A walk will make it better.
2. So will coffee.
3. Read it twice. You’ll notice different things the second time.
4. That applies to beloved fiction too.
5. Take joy in little things. Count the birds. Sample the cheese. Listen to the flowing water.
6. Sunrise is beautiful; go enjoy it.
7. Write early, write often.
8. Ask yourself questions. Sometimes, you’ll even have an answer.
9. Kiss the toad before breakfast – get that ugly task done and out of the way!
10. Not every bird in the flock is the same. It’s okay to be different.
11. Breathe. Pauses are productive.
12. Revel in delight. Momentary pleasures are the stuff of life!
13. It’s okay to do hard things. Just keep plugging away.
14. There’s wisdom in breadth. A different perspective might be just the thing.
15. Remember your thank-you’s.
16. Planning is its own pleasure.
17. Think of the possibilities. Act on them.
18. It’s more fun to have fun. Trudge only when necessary.
19. Surprises shouldn’t always be a surprise. The unexpected is a feature, not a bug.
20. Joys shared are doubled. 

What I’m reading in non-fiction… 2025

Not everything I read this year was about invented worlds. A significant portion of my reading life was spent with books that insist on the realness of reality: bodies, illnesses, narratives, institutions, uncertainties. These are not books I raced through, and to be honest a lot of them were article-adjacent. Still, these are the books that asked me for attention in some way, and each of them repaid my time spent. (Note: this is not my monastic reading list, which I keep separately. That reading was also rich and rewarding, but felt a bit too niche even for a cheerfully quirky blog. This is my curated should-appeal-to-all list. Message me if you want the professional version.)

John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis

This is a book about tuberculosis, but it is also a book about inequality, attention, and the moral frameworks we use to decide what kinds of suffering matter. Green is very clear about his own positionality, and I especially like that he never pretends to be neutral. What makes the book effective is precisely that combination: careful research paired with an insistence that facts alone are not enough. I came away thinking less about TB as a disease of the past and more about how we decide which diseases – and sufferers thereof – we choose to discuss, and which we don’t.

Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe and The Wounded Storyteller

Arthur Frank has long been central to thinking about illness narratives, and returning to these books (even if under deadline!) felt to me a bit like revisiting a conversation rather than encountering something new. The Wounded Storyteller, grounded in Frank’s own experiences of heart attack and cancer, remains a careful meditation on what it means to tell stories from illness rather than about it. Letting Stories Breathe extends his work, asking what ethical obligations listeners, scholars, and institutions have toward stories once they are told. I found myself dwelling when I needed to be skimming; his books are so engaging and thoughtful that they resist instrumental reading.

Herman Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body

Roodenburg’s study of gesture, particularly through figures such as Constantijn Huygens, treats bodily expression not as spontaneous overflow but as a learned and practiced habit. Roodenburg’s insight is that gesture is cultural knowledge and cultural capital: acquired, refined, and socially legible. I found this book especially useful as a reminder that bodies do not merely express meaning; they are trained to produce it. Also, this book quietly reshapes how one watches people speak. I was naughty and read chapters that weren’t directly applicable to the work I was doing. Shhhh, don’t tell my family.

Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

This is a cheat, since it’s fiction, but I chose it here deliberately. To me, Godden’s novel about Dominican nuns captures the texture of monastic life in ways that most non-fiction accounts struggle to do. She brings to life the rhythms of prayer, frictions of communal living, and the mix of discipline and intimacy. All are rendered with an attentiveness that feels ethnographic, even though it remains clearly imagined. Sometimes fiction is simply better at conveying lived experience than analysis can be. And yes, I’ve blogged about it before: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/04/postulant-novice-professed-initiation.html

Hayley Campbell, All the Living and the Dead

Campbell writes about people whose work is death-adjacent: gravediggers, embalmers, executioners, forensic specialists. The book is notable for its restraint. Rather than sensationalizing these professions, she speaks to their ordinariness. It’s a job, even if it’s a job with a body involved. What emerges is not a meditation on death itself so much as on how societies distribute the labor of dealing with it, and how those who do that labor understand their roles.

Jamie Holmes, Nonsense

Holmes explores ambiguity and uncertainty, not as problems to be solved but as conditions that shape perception, decision-making, and belief. The book ranges from psychology to politics to everyday cognition but remains grounded in the idea that humans are deeply uncomfortable with not knowing, often to our detriment. I found it useful less for its individual examples than for the framework it offers: ambiguity doesn’t just confuse us, it actively changes how we see.

So pause, he argues, and look again. Holmes’s central recommendation is not the cultivation of better answers, but, importantly, of building better tolerances: for ambiguity, for incomplete information, for meanings that do not resolve on first encounter. Wherever uncertainty makes us anxious, he tells us, we tend to rush toward coherence – any coherence. We grasp at patterns, explanations, or stories that soothe us rather than clarify what we’re looking at. Holmes urges us to deliberately slow down that meaning-making reflex. Sit with the discomfort long enough to notice what your mind is doing. What shortcuts does your mind take? What assumptions does it accept? What narratives do we prefer for their stability rather than their coherence? As we pause, alternative interpretations have room to surface. What initially looked like nonsense may reveal itself as complexity, or at least as a problem improperly framed.

For Holmes, this is not a call to relativism or indecision, but to intellectual humility. He wants us to be willing to revise, to hold competing possibilities in mind, and to recognize that understanding often emerges not from closing down ambiguity, but from staying with it a little longer than feels comfortable.

Not a bad set of action items as we head into a New Year...

What I’m reading… 2025

I had an incredible year in booklandia, reading nearly 200 books. Of course, 60 of those were read during my Asian sojourn, and many of those were of the “lighter reading” variety. I happily binged my way through several of the Horatio Alger series, for instance – 19^th century views of American life that are unapologetically popcorn reading. If you’re curious, they’re freely available on Project Gutenberg (which is available to you even if you happen to be in China, by the way!): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/168

But alongside the binges were books that built world, wonderful worlds. These books have stayed with me as rooms in my mental house. Even thinking back on them now floods me with bits and pieces of their stories and revitalizes the characters that inhabit them.

Hao Jingfang, Vagabonds

A group of young people had been sent from Mars to Earth as a special delegation. Can you ever come home from a strange place again? I picked up this novel partly because I was heading to China, and partly because the idea of being an outsider in one’s “own” place feels profoundly 21^st-century. This book spoke to me, and I lingered over its intricate story.

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (and the rest of the Wayfarers series)

It’s hard for me to articulate just how much fun this series is. Multi-species crew on a tunnel ship with an AI character – no, not that kind of AI, think sort of “Ship’s Doctor” from Star Trek, or perhaps even Data – legitimately a character. Each character is flawed; each is trying; each wants to connect. And really, isn’t that what it means to live fully? Go ahead, buy the whole series. It’s joyful, generous, and deeply humane science fiction. Much fun!

1. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
2. A Closed and Common Orbit
3. Record of a Spaceborn Few
4. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

KJ Parker, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

Okay, I’m a sucker for the historically quasi-plausible and quasi-invented riproaringly good tale. Tom Holt’s Who’s Afraid of Beowulf was worth the re-read, as were the first 9 of the Lindsey Davis Roman mysteries with Flavia Albia (which were a significant part of my China reading), and the eight short novellas by Alex Zudor in his Agent Strabo mystery series.*

But for witty sarcasm and an engaging glimpse into Roman engineering, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City was a gobble-me-up. (KJ Parker is actually a Tom Holt pseudonym; I’m not sure why he needed one, but, well, marketing is a mystery, eh?). In this tale of city siege, I loved not loving the main character! Orhan is grumpy, opinionated, loud-mouthed, rebellious, creative, crafty, and someone I wouldn’t want to *be* but I’d certainly like to *know.* We get the story from his perspective, snark and all. It’s fast-moving, and yet also full of very human moments. Read it!

Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

I fell for these books thanks to my library app. Yes, and again yes. I read them in publication order but it doesn’t really matter. The premise remains the same: What if you could go back in time? But there are rules. Nothing you can do in the past will change the present. You can’t move from your seat. You can only visit people who have been to the cafe. And you must return before the coffee gets cold.

These lyrical invocations of human connections and missed connections revisited are heart-wrenching mini-worlds, each chapter a glimpse into a relationship that comes to life for the reader. It’s not that you won’t tear up; it’s that the tears have a purpose.

1. Before the Coffee Gets Cold
2. Tales From the Cafe
3. Before Your Memory Fades
4. Before We Forget Kindness
5. Before We Say Goodbye

Of course, there were work books and drive-to-work books and read-on-the-train books and too-tired-for-TV books. And so, so many were amazing reads. But in terms of world that are now part of my world, these four stand apart.

Happy reading to you all!

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*The Zudor collection

Special bonus, since they aren’t widely known: Alex A. Zudor, Vox Populi: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella

These fit the theme of the unrepentant and unredeemable character, as we first meet Agent Strabo at a personal low: cashiered out of the Roman Army, and deciding if there’s any remaining reason to live. He gets hooked into an investigation, and the story takes off. These are great airplane reading – I read two on my flight to Nepal. They are short and have relatively simple plotlines, which is part of their appeal. They aren’t world-building in the way the other series are, but they are a yummy distraction, well-suited for the time waiting for the food cart to roll down the aisle.

1. Vox Populi: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
2. Si Tacuisses: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
3. Mala Parta: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
4. Quis Custodiet: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
5. Non Omnia: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
6. In Vino Veritas: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
7. Acta Est Fabula: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella
8. Et Tu, Bruta?: An Agent Strabo Mystery Novella

...so many good books, so little time!...