I'm home today, unexpectedly . . . not feeling great and working on solving that problem, but hoping also to spend some time with RIII and get started on an editing project and otherwise make up for missing the teaching-artist training day I'm supposed to be attending. The temperature is balmy, the air thick and smelling like saltmarsh; and now that the sun has risen I can see fog draping the roofs and chimneys.

I've finished rereading Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, which I read for the first time last year, and I was again impressed by the way in which she burrowed into the language and imagery of the 16th century as she was constructing a 21st-century novel. Sometimes it was just tiny things: writing about going down the stair, for instance, rather than going down the stairs. Such subtle adjustments in word choice were hugely effective in controlling the tone of the prose, and she made them everywhere. I expect such things in a poet, but novelists aren't always so precise.

Now I've started rereading Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, mostly because I need to read something comfortably predictable while sitting in a waiting room. I may or may not stay with it; I'm not sure I'm exactly in a Dickens mood, but it's hard to find the perfect volume when all of one's books are still in boxes.