A new bookcase arrived. Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen. We are now thoroughly organised although somehow, even though the new bookcase is enormous, there are still piles of books on and beside my desk. How did they get there?
I've been studiously working my way through the bedside reading pile. Not that it's a chore.
Just finished Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer winner, March, her life of the missing father from Little Women. It can be difficult to get inside the head - as a writer or a reader - of a character you know to be rather feeble of will. Unless, of course, you are Proust. But Brooks has managed it, and manages to keep the reader engaged even though you want to slap March from time to time, and although even redemption seems to slip through his fingers - except, finally, as his discovers his only real purpose, as the father of the little women. It's deft, frustrating, and fascinating.
A pleasant change from a few mediocre kids' novels I've read in the last week. But let's not go there.
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