[image error] For many, many months I've been working more or less nonstop on Hotel Florida, to the exclusion of almost everything else, certainly of any extra-curricular writing. While I'm still keeping my foot to the floor (do you hear that, my most excellent editor and publisher and agent?), I don't think it will hurt to give public utterance to some of the things I've been sharing mostly with my cats. (They sit in my office with me all day. Who else am I going to talk to?)

For one thing, I've been reading. A lot. When you're writing all day you need to hear someone else's page-voice. And while not everything I've read needs comment here, I do want to mention a few titles that have given me pleasure lately.

Such as The Hare With Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal. Here's what I wrote about it on GoodReads:

This is just an extraordinary book -- part elegiac memoir, part detective story, part cultural history, it brings a vanished world to life through that world's objects. The objects in question are a collection of netsuke, tiny Japanese carved figures of animals and people, originally made to hold the knot on one's obi, which were collected by the author's great-great (?) uncle, a model for Proust's aesthete Swann. The netsuke passed from him to his nephew, a scion of one of the great Viennese banking families, and then -- well, we all know what happened in Vienna in 1938, and especially what happened to Jews in Vienna in 1938. But wait! That's not the end of the story.... What Edmund de Waal found out about the netsuke, and about the members of his family who owned them (and also about himself) makes a book as alluring and finely wrought as its subject. I loved it.

Stay tuned for more thoughts about my recent reading (I want to say something about Olivia Manning) and playgoing and other things... but don't hold your breath,