What I'm reading right now is The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. (Gutenberg e-text available here.)

Finished The Victim and liked it a lot: funny, deftly told, and buoyantly perverse in its treatment of anti-semitism. (Leventhal, the Jewish hero, is briefly forced to room with his nemesis, a drunk, racist, sadsack who blames Leventhal for everything that has gone wrong in his life -- so some of it reads like an episode of the Odd Couple gone to the dark side.)

What I'm reading right now is Saul Bellow's The Victim. (I was down to just a few pages of Up in the Air, having read most of it this Sunday: terrific book: funny and odd and poetic, and full of small but moving eulogies for unexpected things and places.)



What I'm reading right now is Walter Kirn's Up in the Air.

Finished Bulfinch's Mythology, all 800-plus pages of it: very good and informative, and when you get to the third book, Legends of Charlemagne, you really get to see all the characters Don Quixote got so worked up over. A little florid, though.

Some Bulwords: barbican, churl, samite, gree, arbalest, hart.

What I'm reading right now is Thomas Bulfinch's Mythology -- (available online at http://www.bulfinch.org.)

Finished Angels Flight -- pretty good as far as thrillers go: well written and plotted, and peopled with interesting, hard-bitten characters, and plus there's the Nabokovilian passage on page 209:

She finished opening the envelope, unfolded the page on the desk and turned it so Bosch could read it. There was one typed line at the top of the page.

dot the i humbert humbert
"Humbert humbert...," Bosch said.

"It's the name of a character from literature -- or what some people consider literature," Entrenkin said. "Lolita, by Nabokov."

"Right."

Right. There is another tiny reference made on page 271 and another one on page 317, but they might give some of the story away, so I'm not saying anything.