Sorry for the long silence--Internet weirdness again. I'll post at length tomorrow; in the meantime, the fun stuff I've been reading in the past couple days includes Louisa May Alcott's Plots and Counterplots, early potboilers that are wonderfully Gothic and melodramatic; the delightful and definitive work on gnomes by Rien Poortvliet; Gogol's short stories ("Diary of a Madman" is decidedly odd, and "The Overcoat" is quite amusing); and Pack of Cards, more short stories by Penelope Lively, which are clever and snarky and most enjoyable.