Reading about Reading about Ovid's Heroides

Revisiting an old friend on a cold day

Our book today is Ovid’s Toyshop of the Heart: Epistolae Heroidum, Florence Verducci’s 1985 study of the Heroides of the great Roman poet Ovid. It’s something that’s become a rarity in my reading roster, a work of academic literary analysis, in this case by a Classics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. But it almost doesn’t matter who the academic is or where they’re employed; academic writing just in general is usually so turgid and boring, so clearly the product of the daily practice of endlessly talking to people who aren’t allowed to reply in kind, that almost all of it is unreadable.