Sipping Rituals

Holiday has arrived again, albeit one cloaked with dismal weather and disjunction of a midweek work spot in Indianapolis. 1870 appears to be the time signature for the week. Pressing pause on the Pope's Rhinoceros, I have slid some three hundred pages into Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White as well as Alistair Horne's The Fall of Paris. The former is rich in detail, if often pedantic and reminds me of the better aspects of Peter Ackroyd's fiction. There isn't as much wit as one might prefer, but certainly a surfeit of grime, scabies and licentious stink.I picked a biography of Rex Stout from the library the other day and I was reading how engaged he was with Dr. Johnson, Montainge and the proto-thrillers of Wilkie Collins; apparently he didn't care much for either Dickens or the Brontes.

I am off to the barber's and my goal remains to reach p.400 in the Faber by dusk.