NYC days 14-15

I was again just too wiped out by the end of the day yesterday to write anything - trying a new and probably better strategy of writing a short one in the morning instead!

I made a cumulative Wed.-Fri. to-do list yesterday, and seem to have only knocked a small number of things off it. That's OK....

Top (only) priority for today is finally finish that op-ed that I drafted a month ago and send out a pitch for it. I would like to do some Duchess of Angus publicity work over the coming week: I haven't had the concentration for it, but it is such a great book, I shouldn't just let it sink like a stone without fighting a little bit! Maybe tomorrow's post here will be a Duchess post.

Incentive to work properly for a few hours this morning would be to then really try and break away from 24hr internet news in the afternoon and do one or both of the following: (1) watch Nixon in China on the Met's free stream (it's not just watchable at 7:30 on the designated evening, i.e. last night, but available for the 24 hours following); (2) read Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel. It popped up on my Kindle on Tuesday, and though I've read only the first couple chapters, I deem it sufficiently riveting to have a chance of dissipating the corona news fog!

That said, I will provide a comfort reading rec for those in need. Amanda Craig had a Facebook post today about Joan Aiken, and though I think that the opening books in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series are surely her supreme achievement (plus of course the extraordinary short stores!), her romantic suspense novels for adults were books I checked out of the library again and again as a child. A favorite: Last Movement (though I wonder how its representation of a significant trans character bears up these days?). Of course if you want the simplest and most pleasant books in this vein, you should turn to Mary Stewart: Airs Above the Ground was a particular favorite of mine.