I did not make near the amount of headway in Tristram Shandy as I'd hoped over the extended weekend. It became obvious pretty quickly that I will need to read many many pages two or three times as I train my brain not to go off on its own tangential thoughts while it's supposedly attending to one of Sterne's digressions within a digression. So far I've made it through references to Don Quixote's horse and Hamlet's Yorick and a chapter on Tristram's father's "unconquerable aversion" to the name Tristram. I hope to have Volume I completed by the time we leave for New York.

It made a nice break to turn to Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould's Secret, the story of a homeless Harvard grad writing the world's longest book, an oral history that "is almost as discursive as 'Tristram Shandy.'" Hurrah for quality journalistic style!