Dear Portia, Eddie is a cad. Dump him. Regards, Karen.
FIRST OF ALL: I finally got around to reading Possession and I was kind of underwhelmed. For one thing, the poetry was awful. For two things, there was too much of it. For three, if you are going to write a book with a lot of letters written between people, and you are going to have like seventy pages solid of correspondence, maybe you shouldn't put that ALL IN ITALICS because it is REALLY HARD TO READ SEVENTY PAGES OF ITALICS. For four, does A.S. Byatt really hate feminists? It...kind of came off like she did, and I believe you all know how I feel about that. For five, it was okay, I guess. Sometimes it was jaunty and pleasant.

SECOND: have you ever read The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen? Sometimes that as well is jaunty as pleasant and sometimes it is soul-deadeningly boring. If I want to read about England in the thirties, I will read Evelyn Waugh, thank you very much.

THIRD: because The Death of the Heart is so boring, I couldn't read it before bed, as I would mistake my boredom for sleepiness and get my falling-asleep all messed up. So I started the next book on the stack: Donald Antrim's weird 1993 novel Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. It is WEIRD, guys. There is a scene in which the protagonist (Pete Robinson) is walking around with the former mayor's foot in his backpack because just before the mayor was drawn and quartered by compact cars driven by the townspeople, Pete promised him that he would scatter his body parts and make those places holy, except the foot has been in the freezer and is sitting on top of the fig bars he packed for a snack, and the foot is thawing all over the fig bars, which he doesn't realize until he gives someone he meets in the minefield of a local park a fig bar to eat and the dude vomits all over the place. And that is only PART OF IT. It's kind of insane. But really the point here is this:



A giant post-it, precisely cut to the dimensions of the front leaf, asking me what I think about the book. Am--am I really supposed to do that? Is this something the Niles Public Library tried briefly in 1993 but discontinued after no one could figure out if they were really supposed to write there? If the book had been more frequently checked out, would someone have written something there in the past fifteen years? Is this something a wily patron stuck in there, just to see what would happen? I have so many questions!!

FOURTH: I think Anathem is due in a week. Wish me luck!