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stuff that's arrived since 1/6/2006

Man, I have a lot of catching up to do:

at least two issues, maybe three, of Publishers Weekly
ditto New Scientist
the March Real Simple (March already! Oh, wait, they do a combined Jan/Feb issue)
February Wired (I love Wired, have subscribed for years. Anyone surprised by this? I didn't think so.)
Vogue
Allure
Jane
Harper's Bazaar
(what? I'm a fashion mag junkie!)
American Speech the journal of the American Dialect society
Word (another linguistics journal)
Light Quarterly (light verse, excellent. You may be surprised to learn Tom Disch is a frequent contributor.)
at least two issues of Newsweek
at least two issues of The Week
at least two issues of The New Yorker (Joey tends to abscond with these three so I have to find them before I can catch up)
Bust
Eating Well (gift sub from co-worker)
Harper's
ReadyMade
Tin House
Queen's Quarterly (I'm not sure why I get this, as it's a comp subscription. I am not secretly Canadian, as far as I know!)

Books
Situations and Individuals -- from MIT, to review. I am pretty intrigued by this, because it purports to say that proper names have "previously undetected donkey anaphoric readings." C'mon, don't YOU want to know what the heck that means?

While I was gone Joey got a book of Murakami stories and a book of Munro stories that I haven't looked at.

I bought an Elizabeth George and a Ken Follett to read on the plane (bought in the Tokyo airport's English-language section based solely on page count and that I'd read both authors before). I read the George (I fell asleep before I had to resort to Follett).

This week I also read George MacDonald Fraser's Mr. American, which I liked very much until the end, where Fraser got tired of writing it and just stopped. I mean, I sympathize -- I can't write anything longer than a few paragraphs, and he had kept all the balls in the air for more than 500 trade-paperback pages! Then he seemed to say "Oh, well, can't do anything else, let's wrap this up quickly, shall we?" I think it was supposed to be a striking indictment of British society before WWI, but mostly I just wanted more. Also, Flashman is in it. I bought this before Christmas, so I don't know if that counts.

I also read "A Natural History of Latin," by Tore Janson, which was truly excellent. Very readable, with just the right amount of whimsy, such as finding the word "cephalophore," which is used to describe saints whose miracles include walking around carrying their own severed heads. (I guess carrying other folks' severed heads isn't as miracle-licious.) I skipped the section of Latin grammar and vocab, though, considering how many years of it I took in high school. This would be an excellent book for a fourth-year (or freshman year) Latin class.

Whew!

“stuff that's arrived since 1/6/2006”