If April is the cruelist month, March is downright sadistic

I am back from Southern California, where it was warm, sunny and green. It is miserable here, with a sheet of icy snow on the sidewalks.

45% gestated.

Before I went to LA (on business, with some leisure tossed in for good measure) I finished Colm Toibin's The Master. It was well-written but did not make me want to rush to pick up a Henry James novel, which I think should be the end result of any work of fiction about an author. In The Master a few characters are reading George Elliot so I picked up The Mill on the Floss and am almost finished. I am enjoying it as much as Middlemarch, but it is much smaller in its scope. (Middlemarch and Tom Jones are possibly the two most engrossing novels ever.) I may go on a mini-Elliot kick. All those Penguin classics would certainly be more gentle on the pocketbook than novels written in 2004.