The Inimitable

At the LRB, Tim Parks on Dickens' children. (That link should work now; the initial version I had was through a Columbia proxy. Thanks, Dave!)

Made it to Cayman safely today, though on only a couple hours of sleep. Am intending to sleep long and hard tomorrow morning!

Closing tabs

The next three weeks are daunting; however, I trust I will get through....

Superb review at the Guardian for Jane Yeh's The Ninjas! (Courtesy of Ed Park.)

Tim Parks on the artist he grew up with.

Finally, courtesy of B., definitely the week's best job description (scroll down)! More related material here and here.

Closing tabs

Why it's a good thing our ancestors didn't floss their teeth.

Tim Parks's life in writing.

An amazing video of the butterfly stroke.

Britt Peterson on Leanne Shapton's swimming memoir.  Long excerpt at the Guardian if you want to sample it for yourself; I don't think I liked the book as much as Britt did, but it's certainly worthwhile (don't read it on Kindle as the pictures are much less evocative than they would be in the print edition!).

Over the hump of the week?

Radio silence here largely due to the fact that I've been so frazzled that sharing was contraindicated!  Really I have just been disastrously busy from mid-February to late March, and I always pay the price in terms of insomnia and stress.  However I had a very useful day yesterday knocking things off a school-y to-do list; today's still busy with school stuff, but I then have four days completely clear of all obligations (Thursday-Sunday) and a lighter load than usual for next Monday, so I think I am finally going to be able to dig back in on the wretched novel, which has been fruitlessly calling for my attention in the face of an extremely demanding work schedule!

(Absolute priority once I clear this next bunch of deadlines and finish the teaching semester: lower stress levels!)

Miscellaneous light reading: Jonathan Mahler's Kindle Single Death Comes to Happy Valley: Penn State and the Tragic Legacy of Joe Paterno (a bit luridly written as well as titled, and not reported from interviews but more like a synopsis of published sources, but informative and worthwhile); Barry Graham's The Book of Man; Lewis Shiner's Dark Tangos. 

Have also burned through most of the first two seasons of The Good Wife on the theory that it might be good if I spent evenings not just reading books so compulsively, but really good TV episodes are at least as addictive as light reading, so I am not sure that this is any kind of a solution.  Stayed up late last night reading the first half of Tim Parks's odd but compelling Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic's Guide to Health and Healing, recommended to me recently by a colleague to whom I was lamenting my lack of work-life balance.  (Afterwards, though, I realized that it's not really the right term: I don't want work-life balance, I just want to be able to work a lot and be calm and quiet the rest of the time!)

Bonus link: Lee Child's lessons for success.