Re-reading has always been a thing of mine, and never more so than when I'm under the weather. I recently took a (fourth?) trip through Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which seems to me as perfect as a novel can well be. I also watched the BBC miniseries based on it, with predictably mixed feelings. On the one hand, I didn't understand or agree with a number of their choices in the adaptation; on the other, there were a few key places where their representation showed me ways I'd been misreading the novel. For LoB heads: the lead actor is very cute, just right for the part, and Leo is fantastic, but they got Wani Ouradi all wrong, from beginning to end.
I also trotted through The Fourth Bear, the second in Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime series. I got into Fforde years ago because of his wild and strange and funny and literary Thursday Next series, beginning with The Eyre Affair. The Nursery Crime novels are newer, and the first of them, The Big Over-Easy, was so awful I almost didn't bother with The Fourth Bear. But I'm so glad I did! Fforde seems to have gotten his mojo back, and I couldn't have enjoyed myself more.
Finally, I'm reading the latest No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novel, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive. This series is one of four (!) that Alexander McCall Smith writes simultaneously, and I am deeply addicted to them all. If you're curious to know what the outer limits of human productivity look like, check out his vita some time.
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