Current nonfiction reading is Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert by John Drury--a really fine book. Drury sets himself a double task: to reconstruct Herbert's biography as far as the sources permit, and to analyze some of his key poems, showing how they both illuminate and are illuminated by his vita. It's the kind of undertaking that, in less capable hands, might have ended up as neither fish nor fowl -- bad biography + bad lit crit -- but Drury pulls it off with aplomb. It helps a lot that he was, at the time of publication (2014), the chaplain of All Souls College, Oxford: being both scholar and minister, he's uniquely well-placed to understand Herbert, who wavered between those two callings for much of his too-brief life. Highly recommended.
