Closing tabs

Trying to stay off the computer so that my back (some sort of minor muscle strain, an inconvenience rather than a true pain) can get better!  Currently have laptop propped on a plastic file box, and think I will keep it that way for a week or two: it minimizes internet time-wasting if I have to stand up whenever I want to use the computer....

Delicious things: a super-enjoyable dinner hosted by my new publisher at Public on Tuesday night; a surprise arrival in the mail from Becky in England.

Adorable things: synchronized kittens (via Jane); some pig!

Literary things: Zadie Smith on the Willesden library blues; Lev Grossman on why people in Narnia don't read books.

Uncategorizable things: first-person crop circles.

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: (1) in the matter of concluding installments of trilogies, Holly Black's Black Heart and Mira Grant's Blackout; (2) a book I seized upon at the Ottawa airport and read hungrily as I traveled home (it seems not to have been published in the US?), Mark Billingham's Good as Dead; (3) in a free electronic publicity copy that hasn't been well formatted for Kindle, Martyn Waites's Born Under Punches (I enjoyed this quite a bit, but am not sure it really has aged well: it was first published almost ten years ago, and so many others have now been mining this vein of anti-Thatcher noir that some of the techniques here seem a little clumsy or crude - I'm keen to read Alan Warner's new novel, which also doesn't seem to be published any time soon in the US but which sounds excellent and which can of course be obtained from the US Amazon site in some more or less illicit fashion). 

Dug in deep now on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall sequel: I still think her gifts lie in the way of intellectual things and the depiction of characters rather than in the language as such, but it is an extremely engrossing book, there is no doubt.