gwynnega: (books poisoninjest)
gwynnega ([personal profile] gwynnega) wrote2012-09-16 04:29 pm

LA woman, Sunday afternoon

The weather has finally cooled down to normal late-summer temps today after two days of record-breaking hellish heat. On Friday afternoon there was a brush fire near my workplace, so they did a voluntary evacuation...just in time for rush hour. It took me two and a half hours to get home. Fortunately there were no injuries or property damage from the fire.

Today I celebrated the lack of hellishness by driving to Skylight Books, where I bought the new Junot Diaz book and a couple of little purple Moleskines, and talked myself out of buying numerous other books.

I've been working on the Jo book revisions, which I hope to be able to complete fairly soon. Most of what needs work is in the early chapters. I've started reading Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. I'm still reading Code Name Verity, though I'm not as entranced by it as a lot of people seem to be. I can't wait to get started on Gwenda Bond's Blackwood (which I heard her read from at Worldcon) and Seanan McGuire's Ashes of Honor.

Los Angeles tends not to get proper fall weather until nearly Halloween, but I'd be thrilled if it started early this year.
usedtobeljs: (Anya we persevere knowing)

[personal profile] usedtobeljs 2012-09-17 10:44 am (UTC)(link)
Yay, no more hellishness!

[hugs]
herself_nyc: (Default)

[personal profile] herself_nyc 2012-09-17 02:28 pm (UTC)(link)
I just read the HJ book and the Diaz. Both SO GOOD.
herself_nyc: (Misc - peony bud)

[personal profile] herself_nyc 2012-09-17 10:12 pm (UTC)(link)
Me too. Though I wonder if maybe the first time I read it, it was the 1881 edition ... I have a vague unplaceable memory of some professor at college suggesting that James ruined all his work by revising it for the New York edition. But then I'm also pretty sure that I didn't read Portrait when I in college. I took a seminar in which one of the books was THe WIngs of the Dove, but no one in the class could get through it or understand it, and after a couple of class sessions in which we sat there like bumps on a log, the disgusted professor (an ancient lady who had been teaching forever), told us to go on to the next book. She was so disdainful of us. (I read Wings last year, and really loved it, but I really wouldn't have been able to read it in my 20s.)