Yesterday, during Paul's piano lesson, I read Neal Acherson's very favorable review of Byatt's The Children's Book in the NY Review of Books. I think his take on the novel is accurate (which is not always something I'd say about this journal's fiction reviews), and he also offers a good deal of background information about the period in which it's been set. So if you're not sure you want to read the novel but do want to know what's going on it, this may be the review for you.

And today, on this rainy Thursday, I will continue my organizational foray into the new memoir. Presently I am poring over all my extant rereading essays and thinking about how they talk to each other. I want them to function as chapters, not as stand-alone pieces, and the funny thing is that they really do. Poetry collections are the same way: you think you've spent five years writing a hundred individual poems, and then you discover you've been circling around a handful of themes and styles that cohere into a state of mind. 

Also, I am beginning to reread what may be the linch-pin of my reading life: Mary J. Holmes's Millbank. This is a book that I can safely assume you've never heard of. I found it in my grandfather's farmhouse when I was ten years old and proceeded to read it during every summer visit, until it finally occurred to me that he wouldn't care if I brought it home and kept it. Millbank is ladies' pulp fiction, published (I'm guessing; I have to do some research here) in the late 1800s, and it's all about lost babies, confused identities, star-crossed lovers, misplaced wills, noble manses on the Hudson, beautiful orphans, etc. It's quite a dreadful book, yet I adore it and have never grown out of it. Therefore, it belongs in my memoir, even amid the august company of Austen and Tolstoy.

I would like to know which books you haven't grown out of, and if you think of them fondly or wincingly, or perhaps with a mixture of contentment and embarrassment. What is it about the hold these shabby volumes have over us?