Closing tabs

I'm slammed with work just now: lingering post-semester/post-travel fatigue and lots of exercise are at odds, alas, with the monstrous productivity I otherwise desire!

Two dissertation defenses this week, and a host of other student meetings. I have also rashly agreed to write four tenure letters this summer - it was three, the first two I automatically say yes to as a matter of principle and the third is someone I know quite well and would like to help in any way possible. But then I couldn't say no to the fourth, either - though I now have declined #5, as that is genuinely too many.

Happy to be back at home with cats, but a little dismayed at how fast the summer is slipping through my fingers - hopefully if I can really have a productive week, I will get myself back in a good work groove?

Closing tabs:

Tiny Dubliners. (Via Becca, if memory serves, though that tab has been open for a while now....)

And an additional bit of Joyceana from Anthony Burgess (via Andrew Biswell).

Enjoyed The Gloaming at LPR last night.

Have had some very decent light reading (airports, planes, subways, etc.): a teaser for Taylor Stevens' forthcoming Vanessa Michael Munroe novel, The Vessel (this is the only other series I know of that approximates the pleasures of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books - I really like 'em); Stephen King, The Shining and Doctor Sleep (will save thoughts on this for elsewhere, as I am blogging this week to celebrate publication of the style book at the Columbia UP site and still have four more posts to write!); Rachel Howzell Hall, Land of Shadows (unfair of me to single this out, there's really nothing wrong with it other than a pervasive air of unreality, but I am now officially swearing off the police procedural for a while, I'm sick of 'em!); and James S. A. Corey, Cibola Burn. I loved it - this series is amazing, though I do wish that they would stop having so many different characters have the gift for MacGyveresque engineering problem-solving - it is plausible that one or two would have that sort of imagination, but once you bestow it on everyone, the whole thing starts to seem remarkably fictitious!

Catch-up

Unfortunately getting myself out of town has triggered a resurgence of the respiratory ailment I thought I was done with! Sinuses are absurdly full of junk. On the bright side, energy levels are normal and I am also feeling a sense of accomplishment at having got myself here with all arrangements complete and luggage intact: it is enough more complex leaving town for a full month compared to a ten-day trip that there is always a moment in the days before I leave when I wonder whether it will happen at all.

The bicycle has been dropped off at Uncle Bill's for reassembly and we had a lovely dinner last night at Michael's Genuine (I had mahi mahi ceviche, steamed mussels and the delightfully named "cookies, candies and confections" for dessert).

Light reading around the edges and in the air: the enjoyable co-authored Apocalypse: Year Zero; Inger Ash Wolfe, The Calling (preposterous after the fashion of the early Patricia Cornwall - no serial killer in history ever behaved like this! - and full of institutional and psychological implausibilities in the matter of the investigating department, but so well-written that I was more than willing to forgive those trespasses); and a mass-market paperback I received as part of a trade on a huge pile of books expurgated from my apartment from the fellow who sells off a table in front of Milano Market on Broadway, Steve Hamilton's Night Work.