Summer is haaaanging on in Seattle like that clingy ex who won't stop checking your online updates and it was NINETY-THREE DEGREES TODAY. The cats camped out on the bathroom tile. I promise no coherence.
What did you just finish reading?
Five Days at Memorial and right after that A Paradise Built in Hell, which were both good (not that well-written, altho the Solnit is better than the Fink, which features such Reporter-Trying-To-Be-Fancy-isms as "pate" and "ilk") but also made me want to drive my fists through a concrete wall out of sheer second-hand rage. Sobering books to read as the economy declines, giant health insurance companies try to dick everyone over before October 1st and climate change ensures we'll have many more environmental disasters to come. Reading it as someone with not one but several chronic illnesses (disabling bipolar disorder, really bad RSI, chronic pancreatitis) was especially fun.
What are you reading now?
That Edith Wharton bio. Still. Up to about page 273 and then stalled out, unable to face yet another approvingly elaborate description of yet another really fancy French estate. I love Lee's bio of Woolf, but I think her thematic-rather-than-chronological approach really doesn't work here.
What do you expect to read next?
A dear friend just gave me all the books on the Booker shortlist, so I'm well-covered. So I am -- starting to read the new Grafton! because I need brain candy after reading about Katrina, but I'm not that enthused, due to the very ill-advised dual narration of the last three or four books. (What is it with mystery novelists suddenly snapping and no longer being able to write in first person anymore in long-running series? Is it like an ACL injury in the writing brain?)
descensus Averno facilis est