It was good to sleep in, good to wake up in my own bed, good not to be working for anyone else this weekend. Good to have heat, and a not-lost cat, and a very alive husband. Good to be drinking hot French-press coffee; good to have a coffee table full of books, a wood box full of wood, a garden full of kale.

This weekend I hope to find a few hours to make a batch of Emily Dickinson's black cake. I need to vacuum and mop. I'd like to plant the bulbs I brought back from the island and rake leaves into garden beds. I need to harvest the rest of the fennel and deal with the cold frame and cut a last batch of parsley for drying.

I finished reading the crappy mystery yesterday, and I finished Smith's On Beauty on the island, and now I have started reading Andres Resendez's A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, about the 1527 odyssey of four Spaniards who made their way from Florida to the Southwest and were the first Europeans to live among the North American Native tribes before they were decimated by disease and enslavement.

Smith's On Beauty was a somewhat aggravating read. I want to like Zadie Smith's novels more than I do, and I can't quite put my finger on what doesn't work. She is intelligent, well read, curious, and insightful, but the novels often feel both too packed and too unfinished. In this one she played with the plot of Forster's Howard's End, in the setting of a New England academic community, considering biracial marriages and children, adultery, class differences among Black residents, political differences among Black academics, city versus suburb, England versus America, etc., etc. The palette is vast, the characters teem, this is an approach I am ready to love, yet some element doesn't quite work. I suspect dialogue is part of the problem: there is something awkward in how she handles voices. I suspect character motivation is also an issue: her leading male characters have so little charm that it's hard to imagine why the women would ever have been attracted to them, let alone stayed married for a lifetime.

But I respect the bigness of the effort. I like a writer who is willing to bite off a giant mouthful. Smith does that again and again; she doesn't stop trying; and so I will probably keep reading her novels, hoping that in one of them she'll figure things out.