According to the forecast, daytime temperatures will reach the low eighties tomorrow and Wednesday. That’s all right; I’ll rise early to walk, and throughout the day, I’ll remind myself that the cooler weather will return on Thursday.

In my last post, I somehow neglected to mention Monk, which opened my recent “small screen as succor” season. My older daughter suggested that I try a few episodes of the television series, one that my son adored. I came for sentimental reasons and remained for Tony Shalhoub’s performance.

Of course, I have been reading, too. Since my last annotated list I finished Henry IV, Part II, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre for my “Shakespeare in a Year” project (Pericles out of order in anticipation of seeing this); and for my Willa Cather project, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931). For a seminar led by translator Stephanie McCarter, I tackled her 2022 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and for a seminar led by W.H. Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, The Shield of Achilles. I read John Leland’s Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old for a talk he was giving at the University of Chicago but missed the event. Similarly, I read SciFri Book Club’s September selection, Forest Walking: Discovering the Trees and Woodlands of North America (Jane Billinghurst and Peter Wohlleben; 2022) but did not participate in the online discussion.

Revisiting some books I shared with my children has been a source of comfort and delight: Freddy Goes to Florida (Walter Brooks; 1927), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling; 1997 and 1998).

Other fiction read during this period included Bury This (Andrea Portes; 2014), The Gate to Women’s Country (Sheri S. Tepper; 1988), The Devil and Webster (Jean Hanff Korelitz; 2017), Sipsworth (Simon Van Booy; 2024), The Sea (John Banville; 2005), and A Haunting on the Hill (Elizabeth Hand; 2023). Other non-fiction works included Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir (Lacey Crawford; 2020), The Limits of My Language: Meditations on Depression (Eva Meijer; 2019/2021), and A Wolf Called Romeo (Nick Jans; 2014).

With a small discussion group, I’m rereading George Eliot’s Middlemarch and with 100 Days of Dante, The Divine Comedy. Beside my favorite chair is George Orwell’s 1984, which I picked up to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of its publication and to mark Banned Books Week. (Yes, I’m a wee bit behind but catching up.)