Two years ago, I had a letter from Earnest.  He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains….’I have no place left to live but in my own heart,’ he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms. And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told  no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all. And I wondered…

Maud shivered, as she always shivered, on reading this document.  What had Christabel thought, when she read it?  Where had Christabel been, and why had she gone, and where had Randolph Ash been, between July 1859 and the summer of 1860?  There was no record, Roland said, of Ash not being at home.  He had published nothing during 1860 and had written few letters – those there were, were dated from Bloomsbury, as usual.  LaMotte scholars had never found any satisfactory explanation for Christabel’s apparent absence at the time of Blanche’s death, and had worked on the supposition of a quarrel between the two women.  This quarrel now looked quite…

I thought I would publish this book review, which I wrote over a week ago but was waiting until after the weekend to post, and then things changed in my world and I forgot about it. But it’s been sitting there, waiting patiently, and it gets the pity party off of the top of my page. Can’t spend too much time feeling sorry for myself, can I? No. So, here’s a book review from last week. I’m writing this review a bit differently than I have in the past, in that I’m not quite half-way through the book, and I’ve got a lot of thoughts swimming around in my head…

I finally finished The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. I was so looking forward to reading this book, as I had heard nothing but good things about it. I even asked a woman on BART if she were enjoying, as she was reading it while on the way into the city, and she said that she was engrossed, and couldn’t pull herself away. I started this book almost a month ago, and I’m sad to say that I had a really difficult time getting into it. It’s sad, because the book is beautifully written. It’s the congruent story of a retired judge in Northern India, his granddaughter, his cook,…