New Goodwill acquisitions:

Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife, in an early book club edition, with dust jacket and peculiar author's photo.

Not dedicated to Betty Friedan.

Price: $1.99.

First 3 sentences: "It is nine-fifteen on this hot September morn, hotter than any summer day we had. All the windows are open and soot, like fallout, is drifting in and settling everywhere. Outside this bedroom door, which I've locked, the apartment is empty and unpleasantly still."

Italo Calvino's, If on a winter night a traveler, in a grubby but still cohesive paperback edition.

Book epigraph contains a translator's note explaining that "in Chapter Eight the passage from Crime and Punishment is quoted in the beloved translation of Constance Garnett," thus intensifying the curious translator layers while lifting my spirits [see my War and Peace essay for more on my Constance Garnett habit].

Price: $1.99--far too expensive when compared with the fine Kaufman edition above.

First 3 sentences plus interrupting imperatives, which sort of count as sentences: "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade."

The question is, What do I read first? Or do I go back to the Dosteovsky I bought a few weeks ago at a yard sale, which the Crime and Punishment explanation hints might be the best plan? Of course I am already reading Sense and Sensibility and Keats's odes, so possibly I ought not to add another volume quite yet. . . .

Deciding what to read can be so alarming. Without irony, I say that it will affect the entire tenor of my daily life, let alone what I might end up writing about. This is my major reason for avoiding graduate school: I cannot take the risk of anyone else's reading list. Possibly something good would happen, but more likely not.

My son said to me yesterday, as I was gaping in horror at the lunchtime ambience of the Texas Roadhouse, "Mom, you're a poet, and poets are so not open-minded." I exclaimed at this as unreasonable. I myself might not be open-minded, but surely some other poet. . . . At which point my husband said, "Name one."