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Had a day of errands, including a visit to the dentist to get my broken filling replaced, and am now utterly knackered! Leaving town Thursday and have much to sort out between now and then.

On Saturday, walked out on this at intermission, it seemed so utterly pointless: but had a good dinner afterwards at the West Bank Cafe, including one of the most delicious desserts I've ever eaten. We ate there last week too, after 1 Henry IV; that time I had a butterscotch parfait which a food critic would have called much too sweet but which to me was appealingly like eating a cup full of icing. This was a frozen lemon mousse with a scoop of browned meringue on top and mixed berries around the edge, with a possibly superfluous but delicious-in-themselves scattering of candied pistachios. It was sublime!

Miscellaneous linkage:

The art of lip-reading.

A. L. Kennedy is a fan of Derek Raymond. (Via Sarah W.)

Light reading around the edges (a backlog that I haven't been good about keeping up with here): Tom Pitts, Piggyback (loved it - and thought it compared very favorably with the more-hyped Don Winslow Savages, which I found skillful but almost unreadably pretentious); Chris Pavone, The Expats (fundamentally implausible for all sorts of reasons, but a gripping read and really beautifully executed - I liked this one very much indeed); Nick Harkaway, The Angelmaker (quite good I think, but unfortunately I come to it at a time when I have had an absolute surfeit of this sort of thing - not Harkaway's fault that I have so recently read all of Ben Aaronovitch's novels - let's have a ban, though, on crypto-Dickensian secret occult Londons!); Miss Jane's Undoing, a steamy Regency novella by a former student; and Melissa Scott's The Kindly Ones. Then I followed the Melissa Scott thread down the rabbit-hole: first read Lost Things, co-authored by Scott and Jo Graham (I can disparage this as series fiction all I want, but the fact is that it was sufficiently immersive that I missed my subway stop coming home from Chelsea Piers on Saturday afternoon and had to walk home from 125th St., so absorbed was I in the last bit of the story!), then two novellas that begin the related series in the present day, David Niall Wilson's The Temple of Camazotz and Aaron Rosenberg's Brought to Light. There are a couple more following this one, and they are possibly what I will read next.

Somewhere in the middle there I had a really wonderful mini-binge on novels by Peter Dickinson, almost all of whose novels I've read many many times - but they will bear a good deal of rereading, he is criminally underread and underrated - and some of which are now newly released in digital editions: Some Deaths Before Dying (this one is particularly good); The Yellow Room Conspiracy; and In the Palace of the Khans.

Read one other novel which deserves its own post, but which I may be too tired to write about now. More anon!