I'm so tired I can't follow plot. My usual standby, really trashy novels, isn't working; I get halfway in and skim to the end.

Sometimes I'll reread poetry at this point. Especially sonnet collections -- short yet filling.

Huh. Two opposing views of the latest LKH (Incubus Dreams) arrived in my inbox today from friends. One says:

It's a big book. Lots of words. Lots of sex. Not much plot. ... Except for a very sweet and sexy scene with

, most of these sexual situations in the book are weirdly unerotic to read. Even the big

(that many of us have been looking forward to!) is a dud.

The other:

I did like the

scene. I would agree with her though that it wasn't erotic, but in fact was somewhat edgy and awkward because the characters were experiencing it as edgy and awkward. I thought that was the point, but I can see how it wouldn't work for people.

By a conservative estimate probably half the book is sex scenes or leads up to sex scenes. I regard that as a feature, not a bug, but in spite of all the sex (and you may be gathering that there is a lot of sex, with a number of men) it isn't erotica, it's something else. I'm not sure I have a name for it, but the discomfort seems to me to be part of the intended effect.

[whitefonted for the very spoiler-sensitive, though most of it is about character as opposed to plot points]

Well, I'm sure

Jean Claude

was happy with the developments, the big ho.

Oh, the bastards. Patrick O'Brian died with his 21st novel unfinished.

His publisher are making three chapters of the same available if you buy the anthology of the complete works.

Which any obsessive O'Brian fan would already have owned as individual books.

Never mind, you can buy the last book separately.

Well, since I'm a newly obsessive fan who's been getting the books from the library, I put the anthology atop my Christmas wish list.

But I'm glad it's not the only way to get the unfinished book.

Hardcover: 6980 pages

Woof. When you said "anthology" I had a brief vision of 21 books in a single enormous binding, like Webster's 2nd, complete with onionskin pages. Thank goodness, it looks like 5 HC volumes.

(I mean, not that I am in need of it, but I was despairing on behalf of compositors everywhere.)

I still haven't finished Master and Commander. I restarted it and I got bogged down on the whole practice firing that leads to taking a ship but I haven't actually finished that part.

I keep losing track of who's who or totally lose a mental image of what's going on.

I still skim some of the battle scenes, though I can follow them much better than I did when I started.

My dad loved those books and had the whole collection, which he had licked up in dribs and drabs from my mom's used bookstore over the years. My mom gave them to my uncle when my dad died and it was a real pleasure to see the tattered non-matchy collection of paperbacks displayed prominently amongst the leather-tooled legal tomes in my uncle's living room when we visited last summer.

I just finished the first story in Blackbird House and it did what Alice Hoffman stories used to always do -- bring me to tears.

I think I'm going to have to reread before I go to the next one.