The weather is suddenly cooler, and I guess that's nice. I mean, that's what weather is supposed to do this time of year, right? This time of year, my thoughts turn to nesting, winter time reading. Alas, I can't find Jane Eyre, which seems like exactly what one should be reading just now. Recently, I read The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, who is apparently a first-time novelist. And it wasn't terribly literary or deep but was a good read. And it reads in some ways like a 19th century novel, which may be part of the point. Still, it made me rather long for Jane Eyre, which it references several times. In the absence of Jane Eyre, I could turn to Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, which is a spectacularly fun read! Dolce Carina described it as being something like Harry Potter and good detective fiction all in one, and she's right, as she so often is. I highly recommend Fforde. He's just lots of fun. Lots of literary in-jokes.

OK, last week, T. asked me if I wanted a copy of Kerouac's On the Road. T. is teaching a class on beat poetry next term, and the publishers had sent him extra desk copies. Well, I almost never turn down a free book, and since I've never read Kerouac, it seemed like a good opportunity. And so on Sunday, I started On the Road. I read maybe the first third. And that was enough. It generally annoyed me. And it somehow seems trite, overdone, self-involved, and all kinds of other icky things. But my question is this: am I a washed-up, old fuddy duddy if I don't LOVE Kerouac? Seriously. I mean, I want to be all hip, and so I'm supposed to like his brand of drivel, right? But I just couldn't do it. I wanted to like it; I really did.

And now I'm back to P.D. James's Inspector Dalgleish. I'm rereading the first Dalgleish novel. And it's grand. And I remember why I liked James in the first place. I think that the Zoloft has made me even more enthusiastic about reading that I'd normally like. I mean, I'm always all for a good novel, but I'm really having this sense of reveling in my reading lately. This is a good thing.

So I'm not going to bother to proofread before posting; please excuse the inevitable errors!