If you have been following my recent blogs you know I have a lot of books out from the library, 28 of them to be precise. Too many for me to be able to read them all before they are due back. But instead of making a list, focusing on the books I most want to read and reading them in the order in which they are due, as usual I'm all over the place.
I finished re-reading Bleak House after re-watching the DVDs of the recent Timothy West version so I decided to read behind the TV episodes of Little Dorrit. Little D is a very long book. I started reading it after watching the first episodes of the TV adaptation, which I had to watch on my laptop because I remembered Masterpiece Theatre at 8:30 AM Monday morning and had missed the whole Sunday night thing. But I grew weary of Dickens and I felt the need to read Mansfield Park. (Why? I don't know why.) So I put down Little Dorrit and picked up Jane Austen, which soon moved into the bedroom onto my bedside table.
I had been tearing through Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson but somewhere about a third into the book I suddenly lost interest. So I put that aside and picked up Tana French's The Likeness. I enjoyed Into the Woods so much I was certain this was going to be THE book of the weekend. It wasn't. I got bogged down before the detective ever went undercover.
So I picked up The World Is Fat, which is a bit dry and bland (not enough sugar, salt, or fat) but interesting. Then I put that down and started browsing in The Brothers Bulger, which I didn't intend to read. About 6 hours later I had finished reading every word of that shocking book (Boston politics, corruption, crime, etc.)
For a change of pace I started looking at the pictures in The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries and ended up reading every word of that as well. It's interesting to read the screenplay after having seen and heard the film. Emma Thompson's diary is amusing. One learns a good deal about the problems of making movies in England.
And somewhere in there I lost a whole day to a hangover. Wilhelm took me to dinner at the new restaurant in our neighborhood, Vintages at 611, to celebrate our anniversary, which was a treat. But I was tempted by their excellent wine list and ordered a glass of claret. I drank only about half the glass but nonetheless I woke at 3 AM with a screaming migraine. Ergotamine, a caffeine pill, and cool silence took away the pain but not the other migraine maladies. I spent the day yesterday in my recliner with my cat in my lap dozing.
I will not drink wine again, no matter the quality.
Today I spent much of the day trying to read and weed out old email messages, and by old I mean last November's mail. It's now 8 PM and the ponderosas are black silhouettes against the setting sun and I am about to get into bed with a book . . . Mansfield Park is perfect.