Today's plan was to sit outside reading, but when I got up I found that the ambient smoke levels had shot back up again. This was unfortunate, as the weather otherwise was wonderful, upper 70s with a good breeze. But then the breeze cleared out the smoke! Not totally, but enough that we could sit outside as we'd planned.
My first project was to read the first chapter of each of three books due in a week, to decide which (if any) I would continue. Then I settled in to read the Packer book, which I eventually finished. As for those first three books - one was a biography of Bela Bartok that began with page after page about the demographics of his hometown in Hungary and the surrounding region. If I were more interested in Bartok, I might settle in with this; it wasn't bad. But it was long and dull. One was The Sweeter the Juice, a memoir of a family where one of the mother's siblings left the black community she was born into, to pass for white. I might yet finish this one, but the writing style was too "inspirational speaker" for me; I wasn't hooked. The first of the three books, though... it was a biography of Marcus Aurelius, whom I'm sure is a very interesting person, published in 2009. And in the introduction, the author told us that two of Marcus Aurelius's biggest fans, in history, were Captain John Smith (the one in the Pocahontas story) and Cecil Rhodes. The author seemed unaware that this was not a high commendation! I laughed out loud and set the book down. I didn't want to spend hours with that guy - the author, not the emperor. Oh well.
Around 6 or 6:30 pm it got smoky again, and we moved indoors, then our Thai food arrived and we had dinner and a good conversation with D. Then I spent the evening on the Packer book, which was pretty short, and J. spent the evening playing his Cookie Clicker game, and pretty soon it will be time for Saturday night anime.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}