Final Frances check-in

Ross is long gone, bound for work. Which I guess leaves me to do the yard cleanup, but I can't complain given how lightly we got off.

::knock wood::

We had a flicker in the power supply at one point, but that was as far as it went. We got out yesterday for breakfast and went to Target. There, we ran into my sisters-in-law, who'd managed to make it out of their neighbourhood. They live around 2nd St, up in the 70's, and their floor is about 6 feet above the waterline. They woke up Monday morning to a street so flooded that there was a guy jet-skiing down it.

Last night, after a yummy dinner, we went out in search of somewhere other than the apartment. The Globe and Bohemia were both closed, so we settled for the St. Pete Diner on 34th St.

Ironically, the diner has significantly better hot chocolate than either of the two coffee houses.

I call upon whoever's listening

to rain down brimstone upon the heads of authors-famous-enough-not-to-be-gainsayed and the publishers-who-refuse-to-gainsay.

On Saturday, when I took back Mr. Darcy takes a Wife, I spied a copy of Rachel and Leah, by Orson Scott Card. Now, I have Sarah and Rebekah, the first two Women of Genesis books. I'd been looking forward to the third. So, despite the fact that I still had a biography of Elizabeth I at home, I scooped up the novel. (It also helped put off a decision I had to make, which I'll get to in a bit.)

I started it on Sunday, and finished it last night. As I got closer to the end, I started to get concerned about how he was going to finish it. There did not seem to be as much book as I knew there was story.

It turns out that Card decided he couldn't do it in one book, and so The Wives of Isreal should be out sometime. When? Who knows. He's got another Ender book due out sometime soon, so perhaps it'll be after that.

As for the book itself? Interesting take -- his treatment of Leah is different from what I expected, and much different from the treatment in Diamant's The Red Tent. I think I like his Leah's better, at least at the end. Of course, one of the benefits of writing fiction based on Biblical women is that there's so little of them in there that you can do almost anything you like, and you won't be contradicting anything.

I found it harder to get into than I remember either of the first two being. However, once I got started, it was difficult to put down.

Of course, once I finished, I had to decide what to read next. As I mentioned, I'd gotten out a biography of Elizabeth. There are several more on the shelf, so I think I'm going to end up doing the same thing I did with the wives of Henry VIII -- read and compare.

*However*, I also have a hankering to read A History of the Wife, by Marilyn Yalomi. The question became "do I start with the first biography, then read the Yalomi book, then go back to the other bios? Or should I read the Yalomi book first, so that I don't break up the bios, but accept that it's going to mean renewing the library book, since it'll probably be due around the time I start reading it."

I was going to put it to a poll, then I decided I wanted to go ahead with A History. It's not like there are likely to be people hankering for that one particular Liz bio.

So that's what I'm reading now.