Gray Day

It's raining here, all gray and chilly and windy, though not as chilly and windy as I would like.

Still, a fine day to stay indoors, which is also good. It wasn't going to be a big exciting adventure or anything: just a trip to the Union Square greenmarket to buy pear cider and clam fritters and maybe some lovely glowing autumn flowers, and Trader Joe's on the way home for a few more blocks of frozen French onion soup, which I'm very fond of and nukes beautifully, and if I felt really ambitious I was going to get some chicken at the butcher for homemade chicken rice soup with scallions and romaine and carrots, or if not feeling so ambitious I planned to stop at the Philly cheesesteak place on 3rd Avenue and get a nice hot cheesy steaky oniony sandwich.

But even though I like going out in this kind of weather, as I say it's not cold enough to make it worth my while (plus the cheesesteak place delivers...). And I have plenty of food and water and milk, so even though I'd really like that cider I won't starve or get thirsty.

Not yet in the mood to work on Rennie, maybe later tonight, so I'm spending the afternoon rereading Harry Potter in sequence, first book to last. The first book is my favorite for atmosphere, the third for overall balance. As they get darker and grimmer (or Grim-mer), I find I don't reread them as much. I really do not love "Half-Blood Prince", though it has its fine moments, to be sure, and I can't stand reading about Dolores Umbridge much either.

But I do reread "Deathly Hallows" a lot, in my usual just-open-it-and-dip-in rereading style. And I think it's because JKR, in this one, gets back to writing about weather and food and daily stuff in a way she kind of left off in the preceding two books. And I LOVE that stuff.

So even though DH is quite horrific on so many levels, and transcendently glorious on so many more, I do enjoy it. For all the books, I like to fantasize about being a Hogwarts student myself (Gryffindor, of course, though sometimes I think I might prefer Ravenclaw: could I be a Gryffinclaw? I can just picture myself in that Gryffindor girls' tower dorm, though, with a lovely four-poster bed hung with red velvet curtains), the way readers tell me they fantasize about being in my own novelistic world of Keltia. Which I also fantasize about.

Otherwise, I'm not any kind of fan of contemporary "lit'rachoor", as I find it gloomy and just plain boringly pretentious. I draw the fiction line in the sand after Thomas Hardy, with very few exceptions, and those are usually fantasies or historicals of some sort.

The only modern fiction I read is mysteries (faves are Marcia Muller and Margaret Maron, actively writing; Susannah Stacey and Dorothy Simpson and Ngaio Marsh, out of the game for various reasons).

They're intelligent modern cozies, very scant on procedural crap, totally character-driven. I read fiction to be made happy and interested and entertained and taken out of myself, not brought down and bummed out big-time by some dystopian sad-sack of a "gritty", "real-life" writer, and these do it for me.

So I think I'll go nuke myself some French onion soup, and that leftover cornbread from the BBQ place the other night needs eating up, and go hang with Harry and Hermione for a while. A good afternoon!