Sitting at work, watchimg time go by while listening to music (Tempest right now) and answering lots of old email. And catching up on Liralen's journal, still, in the sense that I'm starting at the beginning and reading it straight through. I've never really managed to read it regularly, but I figure that starting from the beginning will let me see all the bits I missed. Once it hits 5pm I am finally going to run by the library in an attempt to fulfill my library-going urges, although that may be an impossibility since I want to be home in time to see Jim before going over to Chrisber's to make ginger cookies, it being St. Lucia Day. Life is awfully busy lately.

I've been reading a lot, but slowly, and mostly non-fiction I've picked up on my incessant library runs. Back in October I grabbed a random book from the new non-fiction shelf called _About Town_, about the history of the New Yorker as based on its correspondence, which has apparently only recently become publically available. I hadn't expected to find it interesting, being a book about a magazine I'd never read, but I ended up finding it fascinating. The next time I went to the library I grabbed a bunch of different things by New Yorker writers -- such as a book of Dorothy Parker's book reviews (just as snide as her poetry), a collection of some of E.B. White's little mini-essays that had appeared anonymously in the magazine (I had no idea he'd ever written anything but Charlotte's Web and some other children's books), and most addictively, two books by Janet Flanner, who was the New Yorker's Paris correspondent for most of her life and a very, very interesting woman. I also got a biography of her, which I read after finishing the books of her writing, and she just fascinates me. Her writing is so good and yet she was always so unhappy with it, and took a very long time to settle into writing the marvelous journalism that she's now known for -- she'd originally wanted to be a novelist. It made me thoughtful, about how long it can take to figure out what one really wants to do. I'm still thinking about it.