We got home last night, and this morning I am rushing off to play music at Stutzmans' Cafe--its final brunch of the year. I am still shell-shocked from five days of too much food and not enough exercise, and I haven't picked up my violin for a week, so we'll have to hope that my muscle memory sees me through the gig.

While Christmas shopping in Middlebury, Vermont, Tom and I stumbled into the sort of used bookstore that no longer exists anywhere close to us in Maine--too many books packed onto too-high shelves in too-narrow aisles: my favorite arrangement. Naturally I bought $50 worth of books for myself and nothing for any of the people I was supposed to be shopping for.

* Two novels: E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and Margaret Drabble's The Peppered Moth

* Her Husband, Diane Middlebrook's biography of the Plath-Hughes marriage. Baron Wormser loaned me his copy once, but this is a book I ought to own. Middlebrook's discussion of the Joy of Cooking meals that Sylvia concocted for Ted is a poem in the making.

* Two Czeslaw Milosz books: Bells in Winter (a poetry collection) and Milosz's ABCs (a prose oddity: sort of an autobiographical encyclopedia with entries such as as "automobile," "love," "stupidity," and "Whitman").

* A one-volume abridgment of The Lewis and Clark Journals. (Actually Tom bought this for me under the alias of Santa.) It will join Pepys's diary and The Golden Bough on my consult-the-I-Ching shelf.