Off the Cliff

Oh yes. The first week of September was bloody hot too. Now I remember. No matter: slept with the window AC on and this morning, for the first time in a week, my knee didn't scream at me when I first bent it. Or stood on it, because mornings all week have seen me seriously considering going back to the zimmer frame to get me down the hallway. Between a spasming TFL thingy on the left and a crumpling knee on the right, it has not been fun. I hope when the cool comes back that things will improve, because what have I been doing clam shells and pilates and glute strengthening for two months for otherwise? Will remind me that before that I could do sit-to-stand exercises the requisite number of times while this last week my knee objected violently to the exercise.

Because life can't be all Marcus Corvinus all the time, I've started doing Duolingo in French. Probably below my level but revision never hurt-- and it wants me to talk as well, which Ishiguro translated into French doesn't. Also Ishiguro is still very much himself even in French, meaning oogey foreboding. And no, I have no idea how he manages it, or if in fact I'm the only person who has anxiety attacks reading him. There are nasty things hiding in his prose even if I can't see them-- even if I never see them-- and that makes him so much worse. It's kind of like the background intro of any M R James story before the real horrors show up: something is off, something menaces. Of course with James you *know* you're going to meet horrors so the anxiety is warranted. Ishiguro has the same off-ness to me but the horrors are rarely so obliging as to show themselves.

Occurred to me that it's time I read that booklet on the Primavera I've had for the better part of 40 years,  and no I don't recall where or when I picked it up. Turns out to be about the restoration work done on the painting but also includes historical background and interpretations of the painting pre and post treatment, with lovely full-colour plates not only of the Primavera itself but of other works. (Botticelli was a practical joker, did you know? He doesn't look like one in his self-insert in the Adoration of the Magi but so he was.)

This is not only happily reminiscent of reading Magnifico, which I did seven years ago-- and how did 2016 get to be that long ago? yes, yes, covid, but also the Trump years which I blotted from memory. But also hearkens much further back, to high school, and the Florentine Shop and a Time-Life book on the Renaissance with pictures of various interiors,  and possibly The Agony and the Ecstasy (book, not movie). It wasn't the first fully-furnished mental time/space construct of my life but was one of the most brightly coloured. These constructs are always made of scraps of this and that, bolstered by random conflations-- the university gothic of Victoria College, that I passed through on my way home from school, and the clear blue sky of a November late afternoon through the  arched windows thereof, and the golden background of some Fra Angelico angels, all came together to make a seamless whole, which then was echoed in the backdrop to an early scene in the Prokovieff Romeo and Juliet, pale dawn sky over a narrow cobbled street. 

And of course the real Florence did nothing to contradict my version, but wouldn't matter if it did. Mine is a Renaissance Florence of the mind and quite divorced from reality. Though if I'd seen a lot more baroque wretched excess there, instead of an almost Quakerish restraint,  I might have felt different. Rome certainly was all baroque wretched excess, even if the last time I saw it was when I was an ignorant twelve who knew no art history. But Rome sorted very well with the kind of Catholicism I was then neck-deep in, all relics and holy cards and glorious martyrs. Which of course had its roots in the baroque Counter-reformation of the sixteenth century. And by the 16th century my Renaissance was over, replaced by men in trunks and beards who all died young of syphilis.

No, back to the serene beauty and balance of the Primavera, and its newly (in 1984) revealed glowing colours.

Someone on my FFL has been reading The Worm Ouroboros (cue chorus of "Mister, you're a better man than I") (The Yardbirds, you say? Amazing.) I could as soon read Spenser as Eddison, meaning my attention span is too short to swim through treacle like that. I *have* mastered our later speed and shortness, thank you Fenodyree, so I can't be having with the earlier leisurely prolix.

But the Someone quotes Le Guin as proposing "that all fantasy protagonists should speak in an elevated, heroic style." Good heavens, what *was* the woman thinking of? I hope it was a very early essay written when fantasy was still overshadowed by Tolkien and urban fantasy hadn't been invented. Though apparently she slammed Zelazny for making his 20th century America-dwelling Amberites speak like, good heavens, 20th century Americans. (That's not the reason I dislike Amber, btw. It's because they speak like wise-ass 20th century Americans. Likewise Eddings.) Equally, Paarfi's pastiche is all very well for the time he was 'writing', but modern man Vlad should speak in what we recognize as a modern idiom. 

Perhaps she was indeed thinking of Tolkien's style, which is high and heroic a lot of the time but never, to my taste, turgid. It knows where it's going, and gets there. Possibly an English professor of English literature has a better grasp of the historic styles available to him than someone less familiar with the canon. Or his sense of style just knew to choose Tacitus' diction over Malory's.

The usual annoyances of this book list, including the 'not if you ripped my fingernails out' entries (The Road, Atlas Shrugged, Twilight) and the 'why that one fer cryin' out loud' (The Colour of Magic is one of Pratchett's weakest, The Golden Bowl is James at his most obscure, and The Odyssey is five times better than the Idiocy sorry pardon the Iliad.) But I'm bemused by the fact that my reasonably respectable score owes much to my quarantined reading and rereading of the last year (Didion, Wilkie Collins, Sterne.) I still haven't read the two Dickens warhorses that are always listed, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities, and I doubt I ever shall.

Especially since I've been loose-ending these past few days, sleeping till 11 and wasting time online. Actually I do keep up my with bread and butter reading- ten pages a day of Montaigne, one Kipling in the evening, more of the tiny close-printed and stomach turning Pursuit of the Millennium (we're now at the Crusades and its attendant pogroms.) But bicycling and kanji are utterly neglected, and I must start them again because they're cumulative. At least I managed to vacuum the side bedroom today and sort a bag of laundry. Maybe I'll even wash the kitchen floor sometime. (It's not depression. It's that I * hurt* all the time, and feel it unfair to have to do housework when I hurt. I want to stay in my not-exactly-a-kotatsu (stretched out on the sideroom futon with a pillow on my lap and two of G's quilts covering my legs and the pillow) and read in the painfree warmth of same. Which is fine until I move, and then...

 Because Pratchett must be rationed or I find myself reading nothing else and overdosing, my next reads are LeGuin's Lavinia and an Oxford Press doorstopper, Pages from the Goncourt Journal. The first was picked off the boulevard five years ago, the second has been following me through various moves for, I think, 35 years.

I had reservations about the LeGuin. She's always been a, mhh, praiseworthy author, and The Left Hand of Darkness blew me away in the 70s, but there's a certain distance, a certain rebarbative smoothness to her style that keeps me at arm's length and uninvolved. For one thing, her SF has always read like anthropological field reports. Yes, many SF writers get carried away by their world-building, but usually it manifests in an excess of enthusiasm and a tidal wave of details. LeGuin doesn't get enthusiastic about her worlds: she presents them noncommitally, factually, without a hint of 'isn't this cool?' And alas, Lavinia reads the same way. Not helped by the fact that early Roman history and Vergil and Latin itself always struck me the same way as LeGuin's style. Praiseworthy and featureless: nothing to latch onto, nothing to identify with. So I keep on with it because thete's nothing else to do, but I'm never going to enjoy it.

The Goncourts are a doorstopper in tiny print. The introduction has already told me what unlikable people they were. Maybe I should cut my losses and drop them now, in exchange for that 18th century picaresque Japanese novel that promises a bit more.

Oh sod off, LJ. 'Your IP address is temporarily banned.' And not a word as to why.

But cold, so I stayed indoors. Also walking hurts, and walking on ice hurts more. Shaking off the winter doldrums as best I can, I succeeded in finally vacuuming the downstairs, on the principle that clean makes for cheerfulness. At least I can usually manage dishes and laundry. And then I finally unpacked thd laptop I bought 30 months ago and charged it up. Do not like it, and probably won't like it even if I manage to get Windows7 on it. What I need probably is a Chromebook, because that at least is familiar.

Also started looking through a pile of doujinshi friends left with me when they moved. Supposedly Saiyuki, but mixed in with a bunch of FF7. And oh was that a trip, back to the late 90s and the piles of FF7 I translated for Aestheticism. All those Sid x Vincent stories, though IIRC Fearless Leader was more a Sephiroth x Vincent fangirl. And of course at the time I didn't know that the originals were pixillated Lego people. That would have killed the magic right there.

One of the things that fantodded me a bit about LOTR was the sense of deep time, of all those ages of History behind it, and unexplained history at that. 'The hidden city of Gondolin', you say? and then don't tell me anything more about it. Don't know how I came to be googling LOTR, but I fell into a wiki-shaped hole for a couple of hours trying to make sense of who and what and when. The deep time thing should fantod me less if I remember that from the pov of the elven protagonists, the First Age was maybe 40 years ago if that. But I'm still fantoddy with all the names I can't keep straight and the places I can't place. I need a family tree, printed on paper, and even more, a set of comprehensive historical maps:

"Celeborn and Galadriel traveled first to Lindon, where they ruled over a group of Elves as a fiefdom under Gil-galad. Sometime later, they had a daughter, Celebrían. They moved eastward and established the realm of Eregion, or Hollin, which they ruled under Gil-galad, the High King of the Ñoldor. Eregion, to the west of the Misty Mountains near Moria, was a prosperous kingdom during this time, and had open trade with the Dwarves. Also, during this time, they made contact with a Nandorin settlement in the valley of the Anduin, later to be known as Lothlórien. Subsequently, while Celebrimbor now ruled over Eregion, they left Eregion by way of the mines of Khazad-dûm. After the death of the current King Amdír, in the War of the Last Alliance, and the departure his son on Amroth, Celeborn and Galadriel became the Lord and Lady of Lothlórien." Clear as mud, that.

I suppose most of the history is in The Silmarillion, but I never got anywhere with that. I looked through Unfinished Tales, but that was even worse. Ms traditions are so not my thing.

So, as John M. Ford's books are coming back into print, I will stash Petronia's classic quote here so as to have it handy for future reference. She was of course responding to my bewilderment at The Dragon Waiting, a full ten years ago:

I've never read John M. Ford's books, but I've always had the impression he was one of those writers who - I was going to write "don't really expect readers to 'get it'", but a more accurate characterization is probably "habitually overshoot the level of subtlety required to avoid cheesy obviousness".

Work is coming up on its 50th anniversary celebration. There's a Facebook page that I've friended which periodically posts pictures from the distant past, asking if anyone can identify the kids in it. Last one dated from 1982ish, after I'd started working there. The adults were instantly identifiable and identified, but the kids were all unfamiliar.

However I have a commonplace book, kept sporadically between '76 and '89. One of its entries is a list of all the babies at work, that I updated every three months for six years. I took it from the shelf to check. Very very few of the names from 81 to 83 have any memories attached to them, and none were relatable to the children in the picture. So much for that. And then I started flipping through other entries- books read, diary jottings, extracts from plays, poems. Fantoddy in the extreme, especially the ones dating to '78, a year I've managed to delete almost completely from memory. My '78 book list says I read The Courtier: I have no memory of doing so, and when I read it three years ago none of it was even remotely familiar. But there was that family tree of the Montefeltre and Estes pencilled in by me on the endpapers, so... I must have? But- Silas Marner? The House of the Seven Gables? The Sherwood Ring? I didn't. I never. Yes, I recall other books in that list, but those? I *know* I never read them.

However, I did make a list of Downers:
( Cut for same )

Such little things can make one so happy. Environment Canada has fixed their coding so the webpage's little icons now sit beside the text again. Sunday the cafe down the street has Eggs Benedict brunch. And someone on the FFL reviewing the complete oeuvre of M.R. James remarks that Count Magnus is clearly a vampire: and suddenly an oogley of over half a century's standing- the last padlock on the Count's coffin falling off and the lid starting to lift- becomes an 'oh yeah, that' thing. I might even be able to read the story again some time.

(OTOH the boy in the bath in Lost Hearts will never cease to be terrifying.)

Oh look- One hundred lesser known classics. Via oursin
( Cut for same )

And in Wednesday memeing, have finished only The Midnight Court, which is probably great fun in Erse and dull in English; continue to plough through The Decameron, Holmes-pastiche, The Prince, and the latest 100 Demons; and will possibly start The Old Straight Track one of these years, having read the introduction which says the ideas stated therein are All Wrong. Which, fine.

With sun and warm weather comes the Front Lawn Library, and with sun and warm weather comes a decrease in will power. I'm supposed to be reading the books in my house, yes? Yes: and so I have been, for the most part. But as I was heading out yesterday, behold! the Blasted Tree House had a pile of books on their front lawn planter, and oh look! there's The Portable Machiavelli and I was half-thinking of reading The Prince and yeah great!- when Mind says 'You *have* a copy of The Prince grabbed from someone else's front lawn.' Yabbut yabbut this one has the Discourses! and The Mandragola! and many other things, none of which I'm likely ever to read. So I picked it up. And in fact it's not at all portable, being much too heavy, so if I read The Prince it will be from my other copy if I can ever find it again.

But once started I had to take that book about life in the Middle Ages, as if I didn't already have several (unread) of same, and an introduction to Chinese (ditto), and the autobiography of a Vietnamese monk, and a history of the Mongol Empire, and vol 1 of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, translated.

And now I feel as if I'd over-eaten at a buffet- satiated and logey, and feeling even sicker at the thought that some day I must actually *read* these books.

As I was riding up tonyish Huron St with its Edwardian behemoths that sell for a million and change, I discovered a Wee Free Library box. Wondering what the Annex provides in the way of cast-off reading, I investigated. Indeed, the books, though few, were a cut above what wanders into the WeeFree across the street. No 1960s physics textbooks or Doonesbury compilations here. (Even so, our WeeFree is better than the three or four others I randomly stop at, in that we rarely descend to chicklit or self-help.) No, Huron St (tonier than St George to the east but not nearly as tony as Madison to the west) has hardcovers by solid authors- no Oprah's picks or Heather's recs. With a ertain amount of foreboding I took out Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford, which is about Christopher Marlowe. The language doesn't seem as asinine as Nothing Like the Sun, so I may hope.

(Googling about turns up this masterlist of historical novels, and poking about discovers there's a series of sequels to The Three Musketeers. But I poked further and lost the reference. Googling "musketeers sequel" or variations thereof gets me nowhere.)

1. Online articles about the Dr Dee exhibit remind me that that biography last month taught me two things- Paracelsus called himself that because he was, in Greek, para Celsus: beyond Celsus; and exploding stars are called nova because some time in the 16th century astronomers observed the appearance of a new star- stella nova- that was in fact simply an explosion on an existing star.

2. Gloriana's eponymous protagonist yearns desperately for 'fulfillment' (meaning in general, orgasm.) I yearn as desperately for a fulfilling book, and am not finding it. Someone at work said they want to retire and spend their time reading. Said someone is a happy soul, and might very well feel rewarded by anything she might read. I am not a happy soul and grimly continue my plod through Master Skylark, one of those seemingly-short small print books that reads like walking though mud.

Largely because our kidnapped songbird and his mendacious captor recap Bohemian Rhapsody endlessly:
...will you let me go?
Bismillah! No, we will not let you go. (Let him go!)
Bismillah! We will not let you go. (Let him go!)
Bismillah! We will not let you go. (Let me go!)
Will not let you go. (Let me go!)
Never, never let you go( Read more... )

Not true. The nights go by quickly too, and I am always sooo happy to see my lovely comforting bed. I combat the hibernation urge by leaving the blind up on one window, something I'd never have believed I'd do, given my determined efforts to blackout every bedroom I've ever been in. Still not insomniac, in spite of age; still preferring the half-remembered dreams that occupy my sleeps and wakes, to the grey dull light of this warm winter.

Found a webpage listing Toronto bookstores with a thanks to the informant who keeps the list up to date. It's very useful: tells me where all the bookstores I half-recall used to be. I'm not sure Abbey Books- which is now located in Paris, France- even made it into the new millennium, and Atticus has been gone from the other side of the street for over five years. It's Bakka now, moved from the Queen St address given for it some time ago. (Oh, and here's the wiki article listing all the moves. I remember it at all of those locales, including the first: which I suppose I should, given that it didn't move from the first Queen St place until after I came back from Japan.)

Finished Raffles, the Amateur Crackhead ahem Cracksman, then read Orwell's essay, Raffles and Miss Blandish, to get an explanation for Raffles' odd suicidal tendencies. Evidently Raffles was not Playing the Game. Raffles *knew* he was not Playing the Game. So Raffles needed to make up to Whoever for not Playing the Game. This makes me wonder why he ever started not Playing the Game in the first place. But I suppose he was young and indulged and stealing from nice old dowagers was a lark ect ect. Jeunesse dorée, mutters the vieillesse grisée over here, how tiresome it is.

Continue to beaver through my assigned reading for the year. I need goals for reading or I feel I've wasted my time. The goal may be only to reduce a stack of books, but it has to exist or my reading becomes will-o-the-wisp come-by-chance this and thats, falling too easily into detective series and then creeping futility. A reading challenge also ensures that I finish things, because the 'abandon after 30 pages if it doesn't grab you' maxim would have me abandoning everything but, well, detective series, which in their turn can become a plod.

That article about how boredom and attention deficit can be caused by head trauma made me wonder if that concussion thirty years ago had had that effect on me. But no- I had the syndrome from late adolescence on. I look for things that will distract me and then they fail to do so and I wonder Why bother, and on and on it goes. And especially so in winter, even in the dry winter this is currently being.

The other upside of a reading challenge is that it makes me want to read all those things that aren't part of the challenge, in this case white English male writers. Pratchett, Dickinson, Lewis, Francis- how suddenly enchanting they look when I must limit them to one a month and have just finished January's quota.

Finish the last Cooper and Fry- the last I'm going to read, at least- and at once start an Inspector Banks. Possibly if Banks weren't such a horndog, I might not be asking myself what the point of this is. Reading mysteries, I mean. Comfort reading, possibly, as in easy and not challenging; or just 'have something to read' reading- "I wasn't especially enjoying it but I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to read."

In a way it strikes me as odd that what a substantial portion of the population relaxes with is stories of violence and mayhem and suffering: except in my case it's sanitized violence and mayhem. Not quite cozy Agatha Christies, but at any rate relatively civilized British murders with relatively civilized Inspectors doing their jobs. All well and good: but when asked what I did with the last five years of my life, will I have to say 'I read a lot of cozy mysteries'?

I think it's because after a certain point nothing is mind-blowing. One looks for difference, for amazing things: and gets, in literature, the real or imagined problems of ordinary and generally unlikable people; in fantasy, tired tropes and dystopias; and so, well- one returns to comfort reading.

Entry by Gill Polack about how ms scholarship works (and a rather nice book-buying idea as well.)

I kind of knew this in the back of my head, what with all the variorum Shakespeare editions and- lord, what was it? The Pooh Perplex? Someplace where an addled scholar compares 20th century printed texts to each other and finds only the occasional transposed line or squiggly letter in the cheap edition. And that's printed works. Worse with the fifteen mss of St Basil's On the Holy Spirit in remote monasteries on Mt Athos. I'm not at all sure I'd have remembered the information while reading- or worse, writing- a book about manuscripts.

Which said, the book does sound interesting. Libraries are in this year.

ETA: oh. Dystopian YA. Pass, then.

October long weekend with promised pleasant weather- even if I'm a fan of grey cold and rainy holidays, because of the coziness factor-- and alas my Sei Shonagon Syndrome cuts in and says The Watchmaker of Filigree St would be the perfect focus for this lovely weather, and if I read something else my holiday will be less than perfect. Note that I am 31 out of 32 in line for this book at the library. (The no. of people waiting gradually decreases, but not my ranking as second last. After me, nobody wanted to read the book, it appears.)

Instead the library comes through with Americanah, that I barely remember ordering, so to the library I go to renew my card and withdraw the book. Open my wallet and find my bank card inexplicably missing. Can't recall when I last used it, but vaguely remember mid-week, at the branch a happy block away; and there they automatically cancel and give me a new one. These long work days lead to brainfry by evening, even though I *try* to be mindful at ATMs, as in 'I am taking my money, I am taking my card, I am putting money and card in wallet.' (They order these matters better, I say, at the Royal Bank, where you don't get your money until you've removed your card from the machine. The Royal has few forgotten cards.)

But Nigerians in Princeton are not a patch on whatevers in steampunk London, so I go off to Bakka to see if it might be there so I can have my perfect weekend. It is: $30 plus tax. No, enfin: not for a book I might find a grand disappointment. Adichie it is, I guess, unless I stick to GK Chesterton's essay on Thomas Aquinas. Chesterton writes beautifully. 'Of course, he's all wrong,' as my cousin said of Lewis' take on allegory, 'but such a pleasure to read that it does't matter.'

Pooh. The Masked City has been pushed back to early December. Ah well, shall have it in time for Christmas.

The new 100 Demons will be out July 7, and Wild Adapter 8 on the 25th. Hesitating over the latter: it's been so long and the yen is so high and I still don't have Reload Blast 2. Things that belong to ten years ago or more in the past grow pale, even at my age.

Speaking of which, my ambit grows narrower. Proved by me bicycling down to the forgotten lands south of Queen on Yonge in search of shoes that fit. Which may have found, but the lovely New Balance boats that support me so beautifully have indeed been redesigned in a narrower make, even if the model number is the same. At least this store had a knowledgeable and patient saleswoman, so in future shoe-buying will require a subway trip. That end of the world is unbikable, even more so than it was five years ago and in spite of useful bike lanes on Adelaide and Richmond forcibly separated from the car lanes by upright spikes. They end at York St, just as construction and trucks force you over to the streetcar tracks. But nice while they lasted.

Wild winds do blow, again; mindfulness being in the moment fails to recall the last time this happened, but diary reminds me it was my brother's birthday a little over a week ago, and earlier at the end of March, whereby I lost a bike wheel.

Spent the day still sorting through books- in this case more of those Horizons from the 50s through 70s resurrected from next door's basement some six or seven years back. I put a box of the ones I didn't want out yesterday and brought it back in untouched last night. But today as I went to add the last few copies to the hopeful offering, a man and woman in full bike gear with panniers full of vegetables were trying to work out how they could fit two dozen or so volumes on their bikes. I gave them a canvas bag, he did miracles with bungie cords (*not* an experienced bike tourist, she said, but sure do look it) and off they rode uphill into the wind. I wish them safe arrival, and thanks for taking my Horizons.

Even better, I put out an aged Columbia Encyclopedia and a Chambers ditto and an Introduction to Physical Geography (my textbook in 1968, still virgin: I was a crap student) with no hope that anyone would want something so out-of-date and easily accessed on the internet. They were gone when I got back from Buddhism. Either someone has odd ideas about what second-hand bookstores will buy, or they're seriously nostalgic.

(I should have googled Horizon earlier. People sell them on eBay and etsy and amazon, though no one seems to buy, but others blog about them delightedly or give you samples of the contents or provide detailed tables of contents and covers.)

You know the bit where you take stacks of books to be resold or put on the front lawn, and stacks and stacks of paper to be recycled, and this leaves more room on the shelves for the books that are still in boxes, only somehow it doesn't? Yeah. I figure this is one of the quirks of L-Space Pratchett didn't talk about.

OTOH I seem to have had a penchant for leaving letters inside large books of ukiyo-e illustrations. Have found three so far, two of my own and one of a friend's.

Times I think reading genre has unfitted me for reading anything else. On this impromptu holiday, I've been reading those worthy 'might be interesting' books that sit on my shelves year after year, and reached Jill Paton Walsh's Goldengrove Unleaving, the compendium of the two separately titled YA books from the 70s. (The 70s' notion of YA is, as everyone says on Goodreads, utterly bizarre.) This- or Unleaving, in any case- is a book that is, I-do-not-lie, 60% descriptions of landscape: or seascape, rather, and I have to wonder what's the *point* of having something like

The waves play around the rock, filling the foreground with endless movement, with random bursts of white, and the more distant ocean juggles with falling light, keeping a million sequins of sunshine rocking and gleaming and shining back

repeated in varying detail every few pages.

What's not seascape is the obscure sort of characters I've come to expect in English fiction, who think and feel things I never have. I suppose there are late teen undergraduates who fall in love with someone and discern their innate character after a mere two weeks of social acquaintance, and even younger women, completely inexperienced, who decide who they'll marry on the same basis, and it does *not* turn out badly: only I've never met them in RL.

But the safety of this kind of fiction- everyday life and beautiful prose for the sake of beautiful prose- is that, in theory, it will never dump genre events on you. No vampires, serial killers, mermen, psychics, or corpses: and the romance will be, well, not genre romance at least. In theory. But Paton Walsh does not play fair and I shall avoid her assiduously in future.

It's been years, or maybe decades, since I've become as lost in a book as I was in In The Woods. Tokyo, maybe, when I'd be in the English landscape of PD James or Dick Francis, and look up to find myself in Ueno or on the Odakyuu. But that was a cultural thing: the disjunct between the language and emotions on the page and the completely different ones around me was too complete for them to coexist. This was... just being someone else somewhere else for as long as I was reading. Only very persuasive first person voices do that to me-- not even Aaronovitch manages it, but then everything Peter says must be noted by Me-as-Reader because it's likely to come back to bite me. French's voice just sweeps you along.

It helped not knowing what kind of book I was reading. (This is why one should avoid blurbs, but then how can one tell if one wants to read the book in the first place? A problem.) Is it a mystery or psychological thriller or a horror story or a fantasy, or just a mainstream novel with elements of the foregoing? Will not say myself; one's reaction varies depending on what genre you think you're dealing with. The thing I thought was going to disappoint me did disappoint me, except I think that's possibly me being dense. And otherwise-- a fun if antsy ('this cannot possibly end well') two days in another country. Should be happy to repeat the experience again some time.

The upshot of the many Interesting Medical Procedures of this month are that nothing malignant is growing in my colon, nothing at all is growing in my cervix or uterus, and the disintegrating dental bridge is not disintegrating more than it did in February so I may keep it for a while longer. Doctor wishes to speak to me about uterine polyp but as the spotting stopped once I started drinking soy again and the damnable dryness eased off, she can wait for the current work crises to end. Happy crises-- one staff getting married, another on maternity leave, a third with a new grandchild-- but short staffing nonetheless.

Speaking of malignancy, however: Monday the Frontlawn Library yielded me Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun and Allende's Eva Luna. I despise Burgess as I despise Amis, but hell-- it's about *Shakespeare*, how bad can it be? Very bad indeed. Tony, you are nowhere near as clever as you think you are and your male characters are Neanderthal louts. So it was nice to turn to the Allende, magic realism written by a woman for a change, with no raping generalissimos (well, not many) and no Spanish Whore/Mother silliness.