Just finished reading a book Susan Lee lent me, Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Very well-written, severely creepy, quite long. If you're looking for an engrossing, smart summer read, this may be the book for you. Set at a college with a bunch of classics majors, the occasional similarities to Pamela Dean's Tam Lin are kind of creepy -- made me wonder if one author read the other before writing their book. Thought the books are very different in the end.
Last night Debbie Notkin and Susan Groppi came by; I made dinner and we talked about SH endowment stuff. More discussions to come.
I'm not sure what I'll be doing today. Jed gave me Firefly for my birthday, and we've watched the first two episodes together. I may watch a few more of them today, though I also want to save them, hoard the pleasure for a rainy day, since they won't be making any more...
Probably I'll deal with paperwork -- there are some SLF things to handle, and then I may actually get started on this S. Asian lit festival thingie. I handed in a book this week, so I think I'm justified in just goofing off...but I get restless if I don't accomplish things.
Amy and I recently started watching Firefly; I had watched it when it aired, she’d never seen it. The thing I was mostly struck by was how amazingly good the first two episodes are… I vaguely understand why Fox didn’t show them first, but I think it really hurt the show: I didn’t like the second pair nearly as much, and it got me off on the wrong foot with the series. Seen in the proper order, I was much more willing to forgive things in later episodes that I had picked on at the time.
The first two really are just delightful, though. (And I remember thinking that when they finally aired them, at the end of the show’s run, as well…)