I am sad to say that a combination of work deadlines, travel and March Madness have resulted in a sorely neglected blog this week. Perhaps the most sinister effect of the travel, at least, has been the necessity of returning books to the library or leaving them at home before I have finished them - making my "currently reading" list (to the right) absurdly long and my "just read" list comically short. I was forced to abandon Twilight of the Superheroes, which I was busily burrowing through, before I left home on my current trip. I am glad to say this at least - it is a book of short stories, and although I would rather have read it all at once for thematic coherence, at least it won't suffer from a huge reading gap in the same way a novel will. I was 2/3 of the way through it when I callously returned it to the library, and found it, well, very readable but somewhat hard to distinguish from similar works by Lethem, Chabon, and Franzen dealing with jaded New Yorkers of a certain age (30s to middle aged) dealing with gothically bourgeois family problems and using (in the first, eponymous story at least) comics as a metaphor for coping in a millennial world. At any rate, more on this when I have actually finished the book. Weeks from now. Sigh.

Most of the films I have seen of late I have watched on long train trips. This has led me to an odd conclusion about travel: my presence on the Amtrak manages to evoke -- without fail -- the most lurid explorations of sex and nudity from the DVDs I am watching. It is like there is a vast Hollywood and Netflix conspiracy to embarrass me in front of my fellow travelers. "House of Sand" (a truly lovely movie which I hasten to recommend) was the first of these incidents, but yesterday I was turned into a shifty-eyed fast-forwarder by not one but TWO discs - "My Life as a Dog" (a charming, odd movie, which insists that there are some things even quirky small town life has trouble curing) and "The Sopranos" Season Six. Ah well.

At any rate, I have just returned from my local bookstore with a few books, one of them of use for my New York Times Notable Books Challenge:
1) Them: A Memoir of Parents by Francine du Plessix Gray
2) All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones
3) The Colour by Rose Tremain

Now - back to basketball.