Mixed Messages

I'm very proud of myself, and also not. On the plus side: I'm reading two books that I own! Hooray! On the minus side, I'm waiting for 4 BPL deliveries, and checked 3 out of the Arlington library yesterday, because I was there and had ten minutes to spare and so of course couldn't NOT find a bunch of stuff to read.

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, is so far just as good as I had hoped, which is wonderful. It was one of those ones where I SO wanted it to be great that I was afraid to read it in case it wasn't. But it is. There's a central mystery--it's told mostly in flashback--around the only survivor of man's first contact with an alien race. But there's so much information about what happened, that you rally just want the story. It's laced with sadness, but not depressing, which is hard to do.

Star Spangled Manners by Judith Martin. Miss Manners on American etiquette, which is dense (because her essays are always dense when they're not tempered by the question-and-answer format of her column) but interesting. I'm looking forward to a lot of info on where manners come from--the American fork-in-right, knife-in-left, then-reverse-to-take-a-bite is actually an older system than the British fork-left-knife-right-period system. This is because we adopted the fork more gradually, so most people ate primarily with a knife, then put the knife down to use the fork. Or something like that; anyway it's interesting.

I'd list all my library books, but I have to get to class. Another Maisie Dobbs, something by Georgette Hayer (who's supposed to sound like Jane Austen, and appears to), and some other stuff. More when I pick them up!