What I just read for my Caribbean women's writer's class is Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber -- wonderful science fiction, though sometimes rushed and sometimes patchy. Still, it works from a tremendously well thought-out conceit, and the story delivers. (It doesn't really represent the best of the genre -- it doesn't come close to Philip K. Dick, or even Dhalgren, or the Hyperion books or the golden age stuff or even Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga, though Hopkinson and Resnick explore and play with the Utopian conceit in many of the same ways.)

What I'm reading for fun is Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Finished the second half of Charles Madison's History of Book Publishing in America, which contains some really neat bits on nearly every major imprint and publishing house still around today.

"Should I marry K.? Not if she won't tell me the other letters in her name."

Going through this week's terrific New Yorker, whose web site has grown to be an impressive addition to an already kickass publication. It's the only thing worth reading cover-to-cover every week. That said, the Woody Allen piece was a disappointment. The other two he has done recently were also disappointing -- too manic and puffed up -- which is a shame considering how funny the stuff he did years ago for them was.

Also reading through the various booklets of McSweeney's number seven. Based on the first three I've gone through (Vollman, Chabon, and "Little Little Big Man"), this issue looks like their strongest issue ever.

Finished Crossing the Mangrove: Good, though nowhere near as sharp or as enchanting as the author's memoirs.