Once again, I have veered from my current monthly reading list. I've started Dracula, because it seems rather silly to be lusting after the latest vampire novel, The Historian, if I've never bothered with Bram Stoker's. Besides, both R. and S. have read it; can't have the offspring getting too far ahead of me. I'm slightly past the account of the ship voyage that brought the Count to England, and I'm just having a grand old time.

I finished A. L. Kennedy's Everything You Need over the weekend. It was too long, and it exposed me to things I'd rather not have encountered (alcohol enemas, anyone?), but man, do I ever love her style and the way she gets inside her characters. I'll definitely be reading Paradise, but only after I've had time to recover sufficiently from this one.

Finished my Mother's Day present, Rick Bass's The Diezmo, on Monday. The war in Iraq definitely colored the first chapter, but I didn't notice any obvious influence in the rest of the novel. This is another one where the writing won me over more than the actual storyline; the reviews have compared it to both Blood Meridian (I bailed out of that one after 100 pages--evidently Harold Bloom did as well the first time he attempted McCarthy) and The Red Badge of Courage (of which I remember nothing but that I didn't like it). I've Bass' Caribou Rising checked out from the library right now; I've not read anything by him the last few years and I feel the need to catch back up.

R. and I watched The House of Mirth when I was halfway through The Age of Innocence. Neither of us were much taken with it; it was hard for R. to follow since she's not read the book and I kept thinking too much of the book had been left out or compressed. I need to reread, because at the moment I couldn't honestly say which book is my favorite. Wharton is just incredibly fine.