Category Archives: Life

So, school has begun.  I’m on top of things so far, but starting school every year requires quite the transition — from having loads of time to all the sudden having to fight for time to read. I love my job and won’t complain, but the transitions are my least favorite aspect of it. This semester feels different to me, though, since I know I won’t be returning to teach in the spring. I normally have an image in my mind of the teaching year running from September to May, but now it’s only September to December, and then … everything changes, as people keep telling me.

Last weekend Hobgoblin and I had the pleasure of seeing our book-buying friends (here and here) and visiting the fabulous Book Barn in Niantic. The store is awesome, partly because it’s HUGE — it has three different locations around town, and each one is sizeable. We visited all three, of course, with a break for dinner. Here’s what I found:

• Michael Holroyd’s A Book of Secrets:  Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers. The kind of nontraditional biography I like.
• Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, a book discussed by a number of bloggers, but most especially Rohan.
• Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, to add to my memoir collection.
• Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves, for when I’m in the mood for something lighter, possibly post-childbirth.
• Willa Cather’s O Pioneers, for when I’m in the mood for another classic-type book.
• Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, ditto, or I should say, for when I’m in the mood for a classic in translation.
• Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, for when I want something more philosophical.

As for reading, last week I finished Kate Zambreno’s novel Green Girl, and liked it a lot. I heard about it through the Tournament of Books where it got eliminated immediately (by The Marriage Plot, which got so, so, so much more attention, but which wasn’t as intriguing as Green Girl was). Apparently a lot of readers found the main character, Ruth, unlikeable. She IS unlikeable, in some ways at least, although I found myself getting fond of her and certainly sympathizing with her, but that unlikeableness is part of the point. She’s a young American living in London, trying to scrape by on low-paying jobs. She’s isolated and bored and unhappy. She doesn’t have what I can only think of as internal resources to get her through — she’s not interested in much beyond pop culture and fashion, movies and boys and parties. She doesn’t know much about the world and doesn’t know how to reach for anything more meaningful, or even that anything more meaningful exists. She’s a depressed and depressing creation of modern media, consuming as much as she can but never finding any satisfaction in it. She’s full of surface-level images of what girls should be and she does her best to live up to these images while finding the entire enterprise horribly empty.

It’s the critique of fashion, celebrity, party-girl culture that I liked. There is a sense, if only a vague one, that Ruth will eventually move on and grow up, but for right now, she’s trapped. There is also an interesting narrator who in the beginning of the book self-consciously conjures Ruth up and then continues to comment directly on her throughout — a commentary that is both critical and sympathetic and is a pretty good guide for figuring out what to make of the character.

I’ve been reading Zambreno’s blog for a while now and am looking forward to reading her new nonfiction book Heroines. She is a writer I plan to follow.

Then I started Zadie Smith’s new novel NW, which I was lucky to be able to get quickly from the library. I haven’t finished it yet — I’m about 70 pages from the end and hope to finish it today — so I won’t write much about it now. But so far I’m enjoying it. Having a lean, tight structure is not exactly Smith’s thing — the book feels a bit all over the place — but it’s never been my thing either, and I like the book’s different sections with different writing styles. I’m liking the characters and the way Smith conjures up a particular part of London. More on that one soon (hopefully).

Finally, here is another pregnancy picture. I’m going to give you the 19-week one instead of the 20-week, which I wasn’t happy with. I’m past halfway now!

This past week included another trip to a library book sale, probably the last of the year. But it’s not the last book-buying trip of the year! Next weekend we have plans to visit a favorite Connecticut used bookstore. I have accumulated quite a few books in the past month or so, but if I ever start to feel bad about it, I think of it as stockpiling for the days when going book shopping won’t be quite as easy (although I did see quite a few parents with babies at these library book sales, so book-accumulation won’t be at a complete end). So, what I came home with this time:

• Eat the Document, by Dana Spiotta. I liked her recent novel Stone Arabia very much and so want to read more.
• The Mystery Guest, by Gregoire Bouillier. Did Litlove recommend this one at some point? I think so… anyway, it’s been on my list of books to check out for a while.
• Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas was great, and he seems like such an interesting writer.
• Running with Scissors: A Memoir, by Augusten Burroughs. I’ve read enough memoirs and have read enough about memoirs, that it makes sense to me to collect some of the major ones, and this one seems important.
• Borrowed Finery: A Memoir, by Paula Fox. See above.
• Death in the Garden, by Elizabeth Ironside. I know nothing about this book or this author, but it’s published by Felony and Mayhem Press, which is an awesome name, and it looks appealing.
• In the Land of Pain, by Alphonse Daudet. I think I heard about this from David Shields, of Reality Hunger fame. It’s translated by Julian Barnes. It looks like the kind of nonfiction I like.

As for reading, I had less time than in previous weeks because school is starting to get back into gear. My classes start on Tuesday, but last week I had meetings and advising to keep me busier than usual. With the reading time I had available, I finished Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes in the Museum. I liked it. I was hoping to love it, which I didn’t exactly, but still, it was good. I had thought it had something to do with museums, which it doesn’t, at least not in a direct sense: it’s about a family and the changes it goes through throughout the 20th century, so the idea seems to be that the novel is showing the real-life, ordinary events behind the “museum” of history. It has a first-person narrator who tells her life story, and in between each chapter are footnotes to the main narrative that are flashbacks to earlier generations and their stories, all of which are shaped by larger historical events, usually wars. I liked the main narrator, and her sections are the most enjoyable. I also liked the family Atkinson created. It’s kind of a messed-up family, with a lot of stories of unfulfilled dreams, disappointment, unhappy marriages, and unwanted children. But she shows how each person got where they did and creates sympathy for them and their struggles. The title phrase “behind the scenes” also captures the importance of family secrets; there is a lot that the younger generations don’t know about the older ones, or that they only slowly find out about them. There are also many stories that are captured by objects, seemingly unimportant ones that turn out to carry greater weight than the younger generations realize. I did think the book got a little long towards the end, but overall, Atkinson manages her large cast of characters and her complicated story very well.

In other news, I bought maternity pants this past week. Fortunately, I have a friend who is willing and eager to go shopping with me, and she helped me navigate the shops and find some decent things. As of now, I have two pairs of stretchy running shorts I can wear, two pairs of yoga pants I can wear, and now two pairs of maternity pants, which I will do my teaching in. Eventually probably the shorts and yoga pants will get too tight, and then I’ll … live in my two pairs of maternity pants? Not sure. I’m such a terrible shopper. Fortunately again, this same friend is going to help Hobgoblin and me figure out what baby equipment we want to register for, and I’m so grateful for the help, because the world of baby equipment is bewildering. I’m so happy to be pregnant, but, my goodness, there is just so much involved.

To pick up where I left off in my last post … we were out of power for six days total, and have had it back for a little over a week now. I’m still not at the point of taking heat and electricity for granted, though, especially since we had a high wind warning yesterday, which came with the additional warning that there might be some scattered power outages. Enough of this! Fortunately, we didn’t lose our power again, and our house is toasty warm and well-lit. It is so nice to be warm.

One of these days I will write a book review again, but for now, I wanted to tell you about an awesome exhibit I went to last weekend at the New York Public Library celebrating 100 years since the opening of the library’s main building in Manhattan. I arrived at the library with only 45 minutes or so before it closed, so I had to rush through it, but it’s not a large exhibit, and I saw most of it. It’s divided into four sections, each with a theme — observation, contemplation, creativity, and society — and each section had an eclectic mix of objects, including rare books, journals and diaries, artwork, sketches, videos, cuneiform tablets, and interesting objects belonging to famous and not-so-famous people.

My two favorite objects were a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair — a beautiful reddish-brown — and Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, the one she had at the end of her life. There was also Charles Dickens’s letter opener, with his cat’s paw as handle (you can see a picture of it here if you scroll down a bit). I saw a page from a draft of “The Waste Land” with Ezra Pound’s handwritten corrections and deletions, Charlotte Bronte’s traveling desk, a page of Virginia Woolf’s diary, a page of Jorge Luis Borges’s handwriting, a draft of a speech Hemingway gave, and a letter written by Keats. There is a hand-written manuscript of the Declaration of Independence and a copy of David Copperfield marked up by Dickens in preparation for public readings. There was also a Gutenberg Bible.

I love seeing these kinds of things. There’s something mysterious and wonderful about laying eyes on an object that John Keats or Virginia Woolf touched. It allows me to imagine their mundane, physical existence and makes them seem more real. So, if you’re in New York City with some extra time on your hands, check it out.

I’ve been a sorry blogger lately, I must confess. I haven’t answered your kind comments on my posts or visited your blogs to write my own comments, although I have been reading everyone’s posts regularly. It’s just one of those times when my desire to read or my computer fatigue or both win out over my desire to blog. You probably know how that goes.

I did want to tell you about a dozen new books I bought recently, though. Two weekends ago my book-buying friends, Hobgoblin, and I took a trip up to the Northampton, Massachusetts, area to explore bookstores there, of which we found plenty, not just in Northampton, but in the surrounding towns as well. We visited five and could easily have found many more if we had had more time. It was worth a trip, and I’m looking forward to going back at some point. So, here’s what I found:

• Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life. I’ve read rave reviews of this book, and I find the topic fascinating. At $5 for the hardcover, I couldn’t resist.
• Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City. I have a small but growing collection of books about walking, of which this is an important addition.
• Rebecca Solnit’s A Book of Migrations. I love Solnit’s book Wanderlust and recommend it to everyone who might possibly be interested. A Book of Migrations is about Solnit’s travels in Ireland.
• John Berger’s To the Wedding. I know absolutely nothing about this book, but John Berger is intriguing.
• John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Art theory — who can resist?
• Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation. Another book and author I know nothing about, but I have vague memories of reading interesting things about her, so I went with it.
• Laura Kipnis’s Against Love: A Polemic. I’m intrigued by Kipnis and by the title of this book. I’m hoping to find some lively, controversial writing here.
• Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. I have heard about this book so many times on various blogs and in reviews, but I still couldn’t tell you what it’s about. I have a feeling it’s one of those hard-to-sum-up books.
• The Best American Essays 2011. I just started reading the 2010 edition of this series so I’ll be ready for the 2011 one soon. This series has introduced me to some awesomely great writers, and I’m unfailingly loyal to it.
• Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Budolph. For when I’m in the mood for some eighteenth-century fiction.
• Laurie R. King’s The Moor. I found a trade-sized edition of this in very nice condition and couldn’t resist even though I have another book in the Russell series to read first.
• Nicholson Baker’s The Everlasting Story of Nory. I just heard an interview with Baker on Radio Open Source today, and it was great. Baker is my hero.

So those are my dozen books. I spent an entire two days in Manhattan this weekend but I didn’t step a foot into a bookstore, which is very unusual. But it was because my sister and her husband were in town, and they had other things on their agenda. Hanging out with my sister in the city was fabulous — it involved music, art, tall buildings, people-watching, Central Park, and Indian food — and I hope we can do it again sometime soon.

First of all, thoughts about my dog. He went through surgery today and just came home a couple hours ago. He is fine, thank God. The procedure was to remove a benign growth on his side that was getting too big for comfort and was steadily growing. So now he just has to take it easy for a week or two unless he’s all healed up. It’s no fun putting your pet through surgery. It’s no fun for anyone to have to go through it, of course, but it’s a different kind of difficulty when you can’t explain to your pen what’s going on. Poor thing. He has no idea what hit him. Luckily for us, he doesn’t get angry or hold grudges.

And now on to books. I recently finished my first Sybille Bedford novel, The Legacy, and I’m thinking it’s going to be my last. I wanted to like it, I kept reading it because I was hoping to get into it, but that never happened. It tells the stories of two very different families in Germany and how they become connected by marriage. It also tells of one of the families’ sons, Johannes, who is sent off to a horrible military school, which makes him completely lose his wits. His family hushes the whole thing up with results that come back to haunt them. I think to really appreciate this book, you need to have more of a feel for the culture of the time (pre-World War I) and place than I do. And you have to appreciate satire more than I do. Unless I’m really familiar with what’s being satirized (such as in academic novels), I have a hard time appreciating it. The writing had an exterior focus, which also doesn’t work so well for me; I didn’t develop a sense of the characters’ personalities in the way I wanted to. I just wasn’t engaged. But perhaps some of my readers have read and enjoyed Bedford?

But I finished it and am now on to other things. Yesterday I began Julia Spencer-Fleming’s detective novel In the Bleak Midwinter, and it’s going along very well. Her protagonist is an ex-Army woman who has become an Episcopal priest and is serving in a small town outside the Adirondacks in New York State. That might sound a little contrived and gimmicky — let’s see how unusual I can make my character! — but Spencer-Fleming has so far pulled it off. Clare’s counterpart is Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne, and the sexual tension between them is slowly ratcheting up. But, alas, Russ is married. We’ll see where that goes.

I am also reading a collection of essays by Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel and Quandary. I’ve read just a handful so far, but they are good. So far they have all been literary — on Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Job, but I believe there are some personal ones in the collection as well. Her writing is good — serious and meaty, and very, very smart.

To close, I’ll tell you about some new books I’ve acquired. Last weekend Hobgoblin and I went book shopping with our book shopping friends (here and here) out at the Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut. The Book Barn is truly one of the best used bookshops I’ve ever been in, although it’s really more like three bookshops, since it has three different locations around Niantic. We had already acquired a large stack of books before we even made it to the main store, which is really a series of buildings, carts, and structures of an uncertain type, all chock full of books.

From that trip, I brought home the Julia Spencer-Fleming book, as well as Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, Sarah Caudwell’s The Sirens Sang of Murder, and Hermione Lee’s huge biography of Virginia Woolf (in a pristine paperback edition for $5). Also this week a friend sent me a copy of Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book, which I am excited about and eager to dive into.

So, happy Friday everyone, and enjoy the weekend!

I spent last weekend in Vermont visiting some friends; they have a house in the mountains near Manchester, and we’ve visited them a few times in the last couple years. I love staying with them because we lead such quiet lives when we’re there: we eat, read, nap, and take walks; we play with the dogs, we sometimes visit local shops and markets, and we always visit Northshire bookstore, a great independent bookshop. It’s wonderful top relax at home, but even better to relax in someone else’s home. In between our reading/eating/napping, my friends talk about the novels they are in the middle of writing and we all talk about the books we are reading. Oh, and we drink martinis and lots of wine. Yum.

While I was there, I finished up Stephanie Staal’s book on feminism, Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life (review most likely to come soon) and I made my way through much of Scarlett Thomas’s novel This Tragic Universe. I don’t know what to make of Scarlett Thomas. She’s one of the most awkward writers I know, especially in this book compared to the other Thomas novel I’ve read, PopCo. I almost put the book down. And yet after a while I began to like it more and more, and now the main character is growing on me. I like Thomas for the ideas she works with, and while it took me a while to get into the ideas in Our Tragic Universe, now everything is coming together a little more. It’s still awkward, but likeably so.

I bought a couple books at Northshire, of course — I have to support independent bookstores! I got Tove Jansson’s True Deceiver after liking The Summer Book so much, and from the used books I got a biography of Mary McCarthy, Seeing Mary Plain, by Francis Kiernan. It’s a satisfyingly hefty book.

Since I wrote about my thyroid issues recently, I thought an update might be in order. After my radioactive iodine treatment two weeks ago, I’m doing mostly okay. Surprisingly normal, in fact. I feel, say, 80-90% normal most of the time. I’m a little tired and a little easily winded, and the lower part of my throat where my thyroid is is sore. I did have one bad episode last week, though: I woke up one morning and was so dizzy I could barely walk. It turns out a side effect of the medication my doctor gave me to stop heart palpitations is dizziness. It also turns out that my heart palpitations weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they would be. So I stopped taking that medication, and the world stopped spinning. I’m continuing to ride my bike, just slowly and for short rides. So … I keep waiting. If I continue feeling 80-90% normal until we get my thyroid medication sorted out, I think I will have gotten off easy.

And that’s kind of my life right now: monitoring my health, plus gearing up to teach a summer class online. My students are supposedly doing their reading and posting on the discussion board this evening, and I’ll be reading their posts over the next couple days. Hopefully, they will be brilliant!

I think I’m heading slowly toward a blogging break, just like I was last year at this time. Maybe it will become a yearly April/May/into the summer thing? I’m riding more, I’m busy at work, and I don’t want to give up reading time. So posting might slow around here a bit. This year things are complicated by the fact that I’m leaving for Ireland in the middle of May and won’t return until a week into June. I’ll have internet access while I’m gone, at least part of the time, but I’ll have to steal Hobgoblin’s laptop away from him if I want to get online, as I don’t see the point of hauling my own around. So, blogging break.

And yes, I’m very excited about Ireland and our week in London afterward. Our plans are slowing coming into place, such as they are. Fortunately, Hobgoblin and I travel in a similar way, which is to say, we don’t make detailed plans. We both like to show up some place and figure things out from there, if possible by throwing our things in the hotel and setting off on foot. This sometimes backfires (we’ve ended up walking into the wrong part of town before), but mostly it’s fun and a good way to get our bearings in a new place. We did buy some travel guides, but we haven’t opened them yet. The plane trip is a good time to read over travel guides, I think.

We will probably buy some theater tickets, but other than that, I can’t bear to make any decisions. My problem with planning, I think, is that it makes the time away feel limited and too short. I don’t want to know what I’m doing every day, or even what I’m going to do at all, because I want to keep the illusion that the vacation will be endless and we will have time for everything. So why plan? We’ll get to it all eventually.

I don’t think I’ve written about why we are going. Up until this point in our lives, Hobgoblin and I have not been able to/not been the type to take off to Europe for a vacation — and we still aren’t, really. We are taking this trip because Hobgoblin will be teaching a two-week course in old Irish literature (that’s all I know about it — something about myths and legends — it’s a class I need to take) for his university. I’m going along for the fun of it, and because it’s relatively cheap: Hobgoblin’s university will cover his airfare and also provide a cottage for us to live in. We figured since so much of the trip is already paid for (and he will be paid for the class itself), why not add on to the trip by going to London? One of the best parts of the whole thing is that we may be able to do the trip again in two years, when it will be his turn to teach in the program again. We’re thinking of going to Paris next time.

But back to this trip … the other thing I’m bad at when it comes to travel is reading books about the place I’m going to visit. Most respectable readers and book bloggers would probably have made up a list of books by Irish authors and books set in Ireland to read in the run-up to the trip and on the plane. But that just doesn’t appeal to me. I’m more likely to read Irish books after the trip, to remind me of the place I’ve just been. For right now, I prefer to keep the whole thing promisingly vague. Don’t tell me what I’m going to experience, other than that the landscape will be beautiful. People have told me that many times, and I was very glad to hear it.

I almost decided to write a little post about needing a blog break for a week or so, but then I decided that maybe I wouldn’t. My spring break begins in just another few days, so maybe I can make it that far without having to go to such extreme measures. It’s just that last week was a particularly bad one. My mother became seriously ill, and while she’s doing well, I’m worried about her. This weekend I drove up to the Rochester area to visit my parents and help out a bit, and I was glad to help, but this is my first serious brush with my parents’ mortality, and I do not like it one bit. Not at all. But my mother is recovering and will soon be well again, so that’s good.

So instead of taking a blog break, I thought I’d cheer myself up by writing about some things I’m really enthusiastic about these days. Distraction can work wonderfully, can’t it? I spent part of my drive this weekend listening to podcasts, and I have to say I love them. A few months ago, I read this article from The New York Review of Books about all the excellent radio available these days, and I finally got myself over to iTunes to figure out how to download shows. Since then, I’ve heard tons of author interviews on shows like The Leonard Lopate Show and The Brian Lehrer Show both on WNYC, and Radio Open Source where the host talks to his guests for almost an hour. I just heard an amazing interview on this show with Andre Dubus III, whose book Townie I will be reading soon. I’ve also recently heard interviews with Jaimy Gordon, Rana Dasgupta, and Lydia Davis. Also Joseph O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Aminatta Forna, Zadie Smith, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adam Gopnik, and Carlos Fuentes (most of this list comes from The Leonard Lopate Show). It’s so fun to learn a little bit about new books and authors this way.

I also listen to This American Life, where the stories are almost always fascinating, and Fresh Air, which I listen to whenever Terry Gross has interesting guests. Also Studio 360 now and then, and Radiolab. Some of these shows I listened to on the radio in the old fashioned way, but only when the timing was right, which was rare. Now I listen to them whenever I want, most often in the car on my way to work.

The downside to this is that I’ve stopped listening to audiobooks, which is what I used to do during my commute, when I wasn’t listening to music or the news. Commute time is turning out to be precious time, although I don’t want it to be any longer than it is. But there are more things to do with it than I realized. I may go back to audiobooks at some point, but for now, I’m too eager to keep up with my podcasts.

And on to another enthusiasm: have I mentioned how much I love Twitter? For a while I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to use it, but, no surprise, I’ve begun to follow mostly bookish people, whether it’s fellow bloggers, authors, booksellers, or publishers. It’s been so much fun to carry on conversations about books with bloggers, of whom there are too many to list, but you can see who I’m following here. Twitter is also a good source of information on new books from publishers. Their feeds are all about marketing, of course, but it’s marketing news I’d like to hear, and there are often interesting people behind the feeds.

And then there are authors who tweet. My favorite is Colson Whitehead, whose tweets are often hilarious. There’s also Margaret Atwood, Ian Rankin, and Sara Paretsky. Pepys is also on twitter, or at least someone posts bits from his diary now and then. Also, Rosanne Cash’s tweets are awesome; she tweeted about the Super Bowl and the Oscars in the style of Jane Austen, and the results were delightful. And then sometimes super fun things happen like when I tweeted about how much I liked Deb Olin Unferth’s book Revolution, and she tweeted me back saying thank you!

It’s just so much fun. It can be a time suck, but it’s a great way to get news, keep in touch with people and learn about new things. I use Facebook, but Twitter is much cooler.

Okay, that makes me feel better!

I know I’ve written here about how much I love the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City; the library itself is fabulous, three gorgeous rooms packed with books and with art, manuscripts, and rare books on display (including a Gutenberg Bible). They also have the best exhibits. I was thrilled to see the one on Jane Austen last year, and this year they have one on diaries (until May 22nd) and on “The Changing Face of Shakespeare” (until May 1st). They are small exhibits, usually in just one room, but that’s perfect, I think, because you can see the entire library and museum in an hour or so and leave satisfied without feeling exhausted.

The diary exhibit is wonderful. They have a diary written by Charlotte Bronte and a textbook she had when teaching in Brussels where she wrote on the inside cover how she misses Anne, Emily, and Branwell. Her handwriting is tiny and perfect. They have journals by Thoreau, including a page that has a drawing of a feather. One of the coolest things they have is a journal of Hawthorne’s where he jotted down the idea for The Scarlet Letter: “The life of a woman, who, by the old colony law, was condemned always to wear the letter A, sewed on her garment, in token of her having committed adultery.” There is also a diary he and his wife Sophia kept together, documenting their lives and responding to each other, and another that shows drawings their children later added to their journals. There is a page from Pepys, not from his diary, but a page of notes written in the code he used in the diary. They also have diaries from Joshua Reynolds, Edward Gibbon, Walt Whitman, Sir Walter Scott, John Ruskin and some twentieth-century writers such as Tennessee Williams, Anaïs Nin, and Albert Einstein.

Doesn’t that sound awesome? All these things are in one room, and I couldn’t help but think about the creative power all those pages represent. When I see original letters, diaries, or manuscripts, I don’t try to read them — too often the handwriting is inscrutable. I just stare at the pages and think about the fact that Charlotte Bronte or whoever actually touched them. It’s a tiny link with the writers themselves and it makes it somehow easier to imagine them existing as real people.

The exhibit on Shakespeare was also interesting; this one is in a closet-sized room and has just a few items, but they are great: the centerpiece is the Cobbe Portrait from c. 1610, which is possibly a portrait of Shakespeare painted from life, the only one we have. From what I can tell, there is debate about the authenticity of this picture, but the Morgan Library says it has “strong claims to be the only surviving life-time portrait of William Shakespeare.” The exhibit has a couple imitations of the original Cobbe Portrait and also lays out the arguments for and against its authenticity.

Oh, I just saw that they are going to have an exhibit on Charles Dickens next fall — yay!

After finishing up at the Morgan, we did what we usually do, which is to visit some of our favorite bookshops, including the Strand, St. Mark’s, McNally-Jackson, and Shakespeare and Co., all within fairly easy walking distance (although I have to say my feet were aching by the end of the day). I brought home a few books: The Best American Essays 2010, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm, and Siri Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman or A History of my Nerves.

All in all, a very nice day, I think.