First Day of the Year

What a dismal day in New York City, but it certainly kept me from feeling guilty for doing nothing but slop around the house and read. Eventually J and I dragged out to see Volver but then we came straight back home again.

I finished that ridiculous mystery The Main Corpse, read a few pages of Ali and Nino but didn't pay attention long enough to know what was going on (I was waiting for the microwave to ding), and finished Joan Didion's My Year of Magical Thinking, which I've been carrying around for a couple of months. Not the most upbeat work with which to start the year, being an account of dealing with the awful one-two punch of both Didion's husband's death and her daughter's mysterious and possibly terminal illness. But it is a beautiful book, very clear and crystalline in her descriptions of her specific experience of grief and fear. So, that was good.

And I started in on a history of the U.S. Navy called Six Frigates, by Ian W. Toll. Twenty pages in and it's very satisfying. For a Patrick O'Brian junkie -- and I'm an unrepentant one -- this is just catnip. All about how the ships were made, what was going on with American shipping in the late 1700s, how the English dominated the seas, blah blah blah. Obviously you have to be interested in this stuff to make the book at all worth it, but Toll is very readable so far.

So, a genre novel, a historical novel, an excellent memoir, and a taste of popular history: I call it a good kick-off to a year of books.