If it's Sunday …: Reading Resets

A few Sundays ago, I woke up remembering how, when I was in graduate school, I developed a way of giving myself, every Sunday – I thought of it then as a little present, or a mini-vacation, but in these technologically more ‘advanced’ times we might just say that I found my personal reset button. It was a godsend at the time – and, when it came back to me last month, I couldn’t believe I’d ever let it slip away. It still works – wonders!

My discovery came in the early years of a Ph.D. program, when the work consisted mostly of reading, and plenty of it. Before I discovered my Sunday reset ploy, I, like most of my fellow students, worked almost all the time I wasn’t in class or eating or drinking coffee. Days off were few and far between, and – week in, week out – every day picked up right where the one before it had left off. It seemed the only way to get a break was to spend a weekend far away, and the rare occasions when I managed that, only showed me how much I needed something comparable all the other weekends of the year.

And showed me that a change of gears was a good investment of time: I got much more done in the five days after a weekend away than I would have in seven days of virtually uninterrupted work. But how was I going to manage it all the other weekends?

The solution came suddenly, one Sunday, a few decades ago, and it arrived full-fledged, with all the necessary details in place: instead of picking up on Sunday wherever I had left off the night before… I would read whatever new, previously unstarted book was calling out to me. The only requirement I imposed was that there had to be a good chance of finishing the book that same day.

Now, for me, that meant that the book had to be relatively short. I’ve never been a speed-reader. But, fortunately, shorter books were becoming more abundantly available. I didn’t select books with a maximum word- or page-count in mind, but I generally had an idea of what I could get through in a day and still have it feel like a vacation. That usually meant something more like a novella or short novel than a ‘full-length’ novel, and if I’d had an ideal page-count it might have been 150 pages – something in the neighborhood of 2000 ‘locations’ on a Kindle today.

I don’t always remember specifically which books I read on those Sundays. The ones I remember most clearly tended to be in French: Camus’s (first) posthumous novel, La mort heureuse; Stendhal’s Armance; a slim volume of televised conversations with Jacques Lacan. None of these sounds like highly promising ‘escape’ reading – but I’m sure I did my share of that, too. There were novels like the ones Graham Greene originally called ‘entertainments’, and repeated doses of Balzac and Henry James; there were plays and screenplays, and pulp fiction galore – all that I remember clearly was that the Sunday reading always did the trick. I came back to my regular reading on Monday morning feeling like a new man.

And now I’ve rediscovered that Sunday reboot button. I’ll save that for another blogpost on another day. For now, I’ll just say that the first book of my new era of Sundays was a surprising one, for me at least: Dostoevsky’s The Double  … 

My Teachers

This has not been a year, in the US or elsewhere, in which teachers (or other public-sector workers) have always been given their due. I've been thinking about this for a long time, about my or our debt to teachers, about the impossibility of ever doing justice to them, about what first step I might take in the face of that impossibility…

What I've come up with is an obvious first step. And, imperfect as it is, let me dare to hope that it, or something like it, will catch on. As an Internet meme. Or in 'real' conversations, in 'real life'.

My proposal: name your teachers.

We readily name our favorite authors, in a list that, if we are authors ourselves, is sometimes called a list of our influences. (I put together such a list as part of a larger meme on Facebook almost three years, and I refer to it here constantly as 'the 26'.) But what about those other influences, our teachers?

In my version of this list, I've decided not to limit myself to public school teachers, or even to people with whom I've come into contact in classrooms or lecture halls of whatever sort. I've decided to leave aside formal taxonomies, both as criteria for inclusion and as determinants for organizing the list. All that matters is that these are the names of people from whom I've learned--from them, directly, and not just from their writings, say.

Finally, the list is not exhaustive. My lists never are. What I intend is simply to acknowledge that I owe a debt, a student's debt, to each of these 11, as well as to many more.

The names:

• Jim Carpenter
• Paul de Man
• Jacques Derrida
• Shoshana Felman
• Charles Hulbert
• Elsie Hulbert
• Richard C. Hulbert
• Anthony Korahais
• John Neubauer
• Helen Sample
• René Wellek

Please join me.

Here, elsewhere, in writing, aloud… name your teachers. (It's your list that has meaning for you, much more than mine.)

It's a beginning.

Housekeeping, and Returning Home

It was good to be on the road (mostly in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina); now it's even better to be back home. For some reason, however, it's taking me a while to get used to the time change (daylight saving time, elsewhere known as 'summer time', just ended in most of the United States; the November transition is supposed to be easier than the one in March)--and to communicating with everyone again.

I tweeted occasionally from Myrtle Beach, and wrote a few urgent emails, but otherwise focussed more on relaxing than on anything else. I believe I admitted on Twitter that my addiction to the new ABC-TV series Revenge had grown so intense that I started rereading The Count of Monte Cristo as a sort of readerly methadone. Dumas's best books are great to come home to, by the way, and this is surely one of his greatest. By the way, I'm just starting to look for the right methadone for my Once Upon a Time 'issues'.

What seemed to me like the biggest 'event' of last week in the world of (US) ebooks, an event that I would have blogged about last Friday if I'd been at home, was Amazon.com's introduction of its 'lending library', which offers free access to several thousands of ebooks for Amazon Prime customers who own Kindles. This is limited to a single free checkout per owner per month, and your browsing for books to check out begins on your Kindle, in the Kindle Store. For more information, click here.

The main problem I'm aware of as I return to blogging, is that topics are 'clumping': they're occurring to me in clusters that make them less manageable than usual, especially considering my resolution to limit individual posts to a maximum of 500 words.

For example, I've left a great deal unsaid about recommended reading for the Dickens centenary (even after previous posts here, here and here), all of which unsaid material clumps together in a supertopic that you might call 'Contrarian Responses to Dickens 2012'. But the first of those 'contrarian' recommendations--that you read, if you haven't already, Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997)--seems also to be part of a second supertopic, for which my best title so far is 'A Certain Kind of Novel' (referring to a kind that I encountered in an accidental cluster in the 1990s and that included, most memorably, both Jack Maggs and Barbara Vine's [i.e., Ruth Rendell's] The Chimney Sweeeper's Boy).

Please bear with me, though, and keep coming back. I promise to do my best to 'get it all down'... even if it takes a few attempts.

Barring some unforeseeable cyberevent (that stops the presses, so to speak), I'll pick up on Wednesday with Jack Maggs--and, although I won't be indiscreet about the plot per se, I'll be quite frank about the kind of novel as which I read it. If it's been out there for 14 years without your reading it, and it's as good as I think it is, then perhaps a little indiscretion about its subgenre is not too high a price to pay.

The 30th Day

One of the anomalies of the writing life that could stand more attention is the time difference between (a) events in what I call (rightly or wrongly) 'real life' and (b) their translation into prose.

For example, the events in my own life that come to mind as likely source material for my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me occurred for the most part in the 1980s or even earlier. A relationship begun and ended; career changes, culminating in brushes with stockbrokerage; frequent trips to Paris; work as a translator, and as a services coordinator in a marginally '12-step' environment; 'family drama'--these scattered bits of source material came and went in my 'real life' more than 20 years before they resurfaced, transformed, in Kiss.

The time difference isn't always to be measured in decades. The processing, the transformations, may work themselves out in a few years or months. And there are other kinds of writing--blogging, for example, or reportage--where the time difference may seem to disappear altogether.

Still, I'm continually aware of the absence from my writing--or, at the very least, the underrepresentedness--of so much that is characteristic of my 'real life' today. To cite only two examples: a beatific relationship of over 20 years' standing, and over three years' study and practice of qigong and related arts.

Qigong is on my mind today because this post completes my experiment of 30 consecutive days of blogging. As I wrote on the first day, I undertook the experiment on the advice of my sifu, Anthony Korahais, and at the same time resolved to practice qigong every morning. For now, I'll say of my own experience only that it's been very positive in both areas, and a definite success. And I'll refer you to Sifu Anthony's own post from yesterday, which explains the 'The 30-Day Trial' in detail and which may give you some ideas for your own real life in the month ahead.

My '25 Things': A Document from 2009

If you really want to feel old, consider just for a moment that this post will be seen by some people too young (at least in years online) to remember the '25 Things about Me' fad of over two years ago on Facebook.

I sat down a few minutes ago to write a blogpost about Shakespeare, found myself referring back to my '25 Things...' (dated 4 February 2009, like this New York Times article about the general phenomenon) and quickly decided to post the old 'note', unedited, as what I would now have to call an archival document:

1. My dream breakfast consists of one fried egg, one slice of dark bread (preferably a thick end-crust) toasted, a slice of Swiss cheese--washed down with a couple of sips of quite strong espresso. I just had precisely that breakfast to give myself the strength to make this list.
2. The classical musician most abundantly represented in my CD (and now iTunes) collection is the violinist Jascha Heifetz. My nick- and screen name 'Jascha' refers to him, or to this passion of mine, as well as to the fact that 'Jascha' is the closest thing to a Russian diminutive of 'James'.
3. There have been years in my life in which I 'lived for' opera. My favourite opera composer is Verdi, but my favourite opera is Berg's Lulu (either version). Opera singers of today do not thrill me like those of a generation or two back--but I admit that there may well be great (and thrilling) singers I've never heard.
4. The popular singers I liked best when I was ten years old were Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee and Dinah Washington. I've added a few more names to the list since then, but I never outgrew those three.
5. I didn't start learning German until I was eighteen, but when I was in my twenties I spoke it so convincingly that on two different occasions German women who knew me quite well (but didn't know my nationality--a long story, in each case) lost all patience with me when I finally told them that I was not German but American. (It was as if I were trying to tell them that I was a duck.) I never tell this story, because how it reflects on me depends in part on how you feel about German men. Think about it. Or perhaps it's better if you don't.
6. Shortly thereafter I had a French period, the limits of which are less easy to define. I spent only one semester at an institution where French was spoken (in Geneva) but for something like ten years French played at least as important a role as English in my reading, writing, speaking, thinking and relationships. (Even when I was reading in other languages, it was authors who had been passionately embraced by the French:  Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud....) Nevertheless I have what you would call an English failing of joking broadly, not always gracefully but usually affectionately, about other nationalities. I always say that every French film, for example, is the French-est film that was ever made, that every French person is quintessentially French, and so forth. It may not be true, but there's something to it. At the same time, that's not much to bring away from a whole decade of your life, is it?
7. If I let myself go, all twenty-five of these 'things' might be about reading. So I'm trying to keep it to one (more) 'thing', a list of favourite authors, and I'll try to keep it to twenty-five: Austen, Balzac, Büchner, John Dickson Carr, Chekhov, Conrad, Dickens, Diderot, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Marguerite Duras, Euripides, Freud, Henry James, Kafka, Kleist, Marx, Thich Nhat Hanh, Nietzsche, Plato, Ruth Rendell, Sade, Schiller, Shakespeare, Simenon, Wodehouse. (That's one too many, but there's no one here I can part with.)
8. One more 'thing': a readerly passion I can't remember ever discussing with anyone is for what used to be called the Viking Portables (typically containing at least one novel, a half-dozen short stories, a selection of letters and essays). The series dates back to World War II, and my own addiction, to The Portable Faulkner, which I bought in hardback almost fifty years ago. The Portable D.H. Lawrence got me through many cold nights during one of my Korean winters, and, when I read in James Jones's Some Came Running that the protagonist had made it through WW II with the help of five Portables (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe), that set me on a quest for the last three, which had been out of print for many years. I can't imagine parting with any of them. Now the series is being repackaged as part of Penguin Classics, and of course for Kindle. It's all good.
9. I'm a curious sort of writer, in that as of age 61 I've published only a few articles and a few translations (although one of the latter was a curious commercial success, Dictionary of Symbolism). I'm now revising a novel originally conceived in the 1990s, and I have some concern that, because my partner is a painter and the novel involves some shenanigans at the edges of 'the art world', that the book could be taken as a reflection on him or on other artists whom we've come to know. In truth, when the book was first drafted, Jimmy had yet to find himself as a painter. The novel even contains a hint that it is in truth 'not about how things happen in the art world' but is instead, 'perhaps, about letting go'--another theme of Jimmy's, but one to which he found his way years after that hint was drafted.
10. If my mother were still alive, she would be 100 this month. She suffered from Alzheimer's, but in her very last years (she died twelve years ago) she recovered a sweetness that I remembered from my childhood. The most surprising thing about her (the most unusual difference between her and me) was that she had no patience for fiction, whether in print or on the screen.
11. If my father were still alive, he would be 105 this spring. (He died almost six years ago.) He was an organic chemist (first a petroleum chemist, then a blood chemist; he had an inability to retire that I apparently did not inherit), but he read more widely in more different areas, including all eras of European and U.S. literature, than anyone else I've ever known. Like my mother (who studied and taught mathematics), he was brilliant. He originally wanted to become a doctor but couldn't afford to study medicine. I think of him as a man of enormous generosity.
12. When I was in my twenties, I felt most (eerily?) at home stepping off a train in any randomly chosen German city and walking from the station into town. By my forties that random German city had been replaced by London: I had always been happy in London, but it's been clear for a long time now that if I had to choose somewhere other than Gainesville to live, and could select anywhere in the world, it would be London. It's clear enough to make you believe in 'past lives'.
13. The adult outside my family whom I most admired while I was growing up was a physician, Dr Sam Hartman, the father of friends in my year of school. We lived in Beaumont, Texas, and you will not be surprised to read that he was the only person I knew who subscribed to the New York Review of Books, who had read all of Orwell's books from the 1930s, all of Lawrence Durrell, all of Henry Miller--you get the idea. He (and my father) still embody for me 'enlightenment' in every sense of the word. I don't think that he or anyone else is his family knew what a gift they were to the rest of us.
14. I have a rarely indulged fondness for little things. For example, if Jimmy and I had all the money in the world, I would still do the laundry myself, at home, but I'd use detergent from the little boxes they sell in machines in laundromats, one or two boxes for every load. That's the only thing I can think of that great wealth would definitely change about my life. (Jimmy may have a longer list.)
15. Jimmy and I are not completely without differences, though. He would be quite happy spending the rest of his life listening to stereophonic sound, whereas I have an admittedly unnatural fondness for mono. (Listening to Toscanini recordings in particular triggers a memory of 'listening to music on the kitchen radio' when I was very young. And the right recordings from the Busch Quartet or early-to-middle Heifetz do things to me I can't explain.) This (stereo v. mono) may seem like a minor difference, but it's the biggest one I can come up with. I'm not sure that there's anyone else who knows us well enough to know how very much we are alike.
16. One last musical 'thing' and then I'll move on: the kind of music I enjoy most, in performance, is chamber music, hands down. The most powerful such performance I ever heard was of Bartók's String Quartet No. 6 by the Guarneri Quartet in Washington about ten years ago.
17. Marlowe (the most vocal of our stuffed animals) wants me to make it clear once and for all that he is named for the playwright Christopher Marlowe, not Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, not Conrad's narrator Marlow, not Marlo Thomas. Marlowe should know: his name is 'self-selected'. As the quintessential black sheep, he, through his deportment (riding ceiling fans, reading boys' adventure novels under the covers with a flashlight after lights-out--well, it would take another list of at least 25 'things'), made it clear that he should bear the name of the original 'bad boy'--alleged sexual outlaw, counterfeiter, heretic and spy. It doesn't hurt that the original Marlowe was a rival of Shakespeare's, and our stuffed dog was already named Willy (after the Bard); our Marlowe, on behalf of sheep everywhere, has 'issues' with all dogs (he doesn't like to take orders) and bristles whenever there is a reference on TV to 'Afghan President Hamid Karzai' or Slumdog Millionaire.
18. When we were planning our move from Maryland to Florida in 2003, Marlowe told Willy (who, being a dog with serious eyebrows, looks quite worried all the time anyway) that he (W.) was to stay behind at the old house and live in what Marlowe described as 'a household of cats'. Not till moving day did Marlowe tell Willy that M. had interceded on W.'s behalf and persuaded us to take him along after all. (This story captures the essence of both animals and their interaction.)
19. You might say that I have a weakness for dogs. Our habit of naming stuffed animals for authors (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Dickens) goes back to my having had springer spaniels in the 1980s named for Marguerite Duras (Maggie) and Michel Foucault (Fookie). They were not stuffed, except after mealtime. I still miss them. They made it clear to me, if any reminder was necessary, how very dog-like I am.... When I was about five and had been away with my mother visiting my grandparents in Wisconsin, I returned to find that my beloved cocker spaniel puppy Brownie was no longer in residence. My father told me he had traded Brownie for a 45 rpm record player for me. (It was not until I was in the fourth decade of my life that it occurred to me that he had simply found someone who was willing to adopt Brownie, then had gone out and paid cash for the record player.) My first 45 was 'Come on-a My House, My House-a Come On', which may explain a lot, but not to poor Brownie. At least it was Rosemary Clooney, however unhappy she was about singing that particular song. All four of us made some compromises. I hope Brownie had a good life. Obviously, I still miss him.
20. I do better with cats than, say, Willy does, but I take them on a case-by-case basis.
21. Not all of our stuffed animals have literary names. Bosco, who hibernates, and his niece and ward Ovaltine, who has no choice but to hibernate alongside him, are named for chocolate beverages. Other animals are named for saints/holidays (Valentine, Patrick), ballet dancers (Rudi), flavours (Cookies, Cream) and dental hygiene products (the fraternal twins Toothpaste and Flosswell).
22. My least favourite means of communication is the telephone. It can be useful, I admit, but I try to keep it in its place.
23. I used to run. I ran for almost thirty years, starting in my late twenties, distances up to 20 km (approximately a half-marathon). I thought I would run forever, but my running 'career' was cut short by back problems, which led to physical therapy and a string of referrals (physical therapy, massage therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, neurology) culminating in a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease last spring. I've told the story elsewhere of how in the course of several months acupuncture, chiropractic, and chi kung and chi kung therapy turned my symptoms around, to the point where my neurologist proposed reducing my medication and even said that if he had been seeing me for the first time that day I would not have qualified for a diagnosis of Parkinson's. Now Jimmy and I take chi kung and related classes six times a week, and I have acupuncture three times a month. We are growing more and more 'Eastern' in our approach to life, and this is helping us to embrace it as never before. Our debt to everyone at the Gainesville Wellness Center, and to Cosmos Chi Kung, is incalculable.
24. When I first met Jimmy, almost eighteen years ago, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Today he makes me happier still.
25. The French expression for 'don't go on and on forever' is, literally translated, 'don't tell your life's story'. Guess I didn't get the memo.

Kaffeeklatsch

If I delay much longer my promised blogpost containing Brent Mashburn's coffee secrets, the first anniversary of the promise will be upon us.

First, a reprise of the essentials of my earlier post about coffee. I recommend a (short) latte made with 1+ ounce (30 - 40 ml.) of brewed espresso and 2 ounces (60 ml.) of heated (not boiled) whole milk, sweetened with a single packet of Sugar in the Raw (optional). Recommended methods for brewing espresso: (a) a Nespresso coffee maker, using a capsule of 'Ristretto'; or (b) a 'moka' espresso maker, using illy beans you grind yourself. Let me add that, if you want to froth the milk, you can get an inexpensive frother from IKEA for about two dollars U.S., plus postage if you're ordering through Amazon and not picking it up in person at an IKEA store.

Brent Mashburn, who is known to the public as an investment research analyst and research engineer (his blog is Luminous Logic), also happens to have forgotten more about coffee than I, at least, will ever know. He readily shared his recipe for 'skinny' cappuccino when I asked for it last year, and gave me permission to pass it along to you. Here goes, with thanks to Brent and apologies to you for the delay.

Brent prepares the coffee component using a Nespresso machine and capsules. His personal choice of capsule (like mine) is 'Ristretto'; his wife's is 'Arpeggio'. They use the larger button on the Nespresso machine, which dispenses a larger quantity of liquid. They prepare the milk using a Nespresso Aeroccino frother and organic fat-free milk (fat-free being the key to better frothing). 'Pour the milk into the Aeroccino until it just barely covers the spinning frother part on the bottom'--about 3.5 ounces (100+ ml.). 'The only other secret is to dump in the milk clumsily as soon as the Aeroccino cuts off.  That way it's still a foamy mixture and "dumping" it in achieves the same effect as if you'd stirred it in--it all mixes well.' (If you delay adding the foamed milk to the coffee component, the milk and froth tend to separate, and blending and clean-up are more difficult.)

I've also been keeping you waiting for a few lines about the connection between Balzac and coffee--but you may know all about it already. He had a passion for coffee that even Brent Mashburn and I could never match; witness the fact that there are few or no coffee merchants or cafés named Mashburn's or Hulbert's and so many named for Balzac. If you're feeling brave you can explore the extent of his coffee addiction at the website The Old Foodie--and even there what you'll find is mostly limited to Balzac's public admissions....

30 Days Hath September

I've been away from you for longer than I like, and, with the help of some advice from my sifu (Anthony Korahais), I'm vowing to do better in this new month. In a number of our qigong classes, he's proposed that we make resolutions for the month of September, things that we vow to do every day for these 30 days. (You'll often hear that if you want to establish a new habit, it's a good idea to repeat the action in question every day for 21 days. Thirty days? All the better.)

So I'm vowing to blog every day this month--and to practice qigong every morning. The first vow is partly an experiment: to see not so much whether I can do it (after all, I have decades of journalling behind me) as what happens when I do.

It may seem like a strange way to begin, but I'd be remiss if I didn't write something about two ebooks that appeared this morning, one in the UK and the other internationally.

What I'm calling the UK ebook is the first English-language edition of Jo Nesbø's novel Headhunters. (The US edition will appear next week.) I've been singing Nesbø's praises for years, usually talking about the Harry Hole series (nine crime novels to date, of which The Snowman was most recently published in the US), which still seem to be the books for which he's most likely to be remembered. But only a handful of the Hole novels are available in the US, and the first two haven't been published in English anywhere. For readers who are ready for something very different, the standalone Headhunters may be the ideal choice. It's been called a 'caper' novel, and I always describe it as 'freewheeling'. The less one knows about the plot in advance the better--but I can say that the title refers to corporate headhunting, that surprising crimes are involved, and that this is one of those novels in which two adversaries face off repeatedly, through all the turns of a shifting game of cat and mouse. It's also an amazing book to have written--in its own very different way almost as daring as Ian McEwan's Atonement. Will you still be thinking about it a week after you finish it? Quite possibly not--for that, read the Harry Hole novels instead. (Not that you have to choose!)

It's also worth mentioning that all of Jo Nesbø's revenues from Headhunters (in Norway and internationally, from the novel and the films based on it) go to the Harry Hole Foundation, for reading and writing programs in the Third World.

More widely publicized is this morning's release, in the US and the UK, of Stephen King's eformat-only novella Mile 81. Again, it would hardly be the one work by Stephen King that I would recommend as a starting place--but with King fewer people are looking for a starting place than with Nesbø: people may not agree about Stephen King, but most people are comfortable with their own take on him, whether they love the entire corpus (and, in some cases, read little else), strongly prefer one phase or genre over another, or view him with considerable condescension. (For the record, I personally champion the King of the later short stories but find that we neglect any of him at our peril.) But if you consider yourself a King fan, you will likely enjoy Mile 81 (which plays both the automobile-horror and the childhood cards) and the appended preview of the next full-length King book, 11/22/63, which is due in November.

I'd like to note one (further?) milestone, as I see it, in the publication of Mile 81: it's an ebook-only publication but no one is harping on the fact. There's no illusion that the novella's eformattedness is news. We've come a long way since Riding the Bullet and The Plant....

Balzac Would Approve (Almost)

My idea of the perfect morning brew: a (short) latte made with 1+ ounce (30 - 40 ml.) of brewed espresso and 2 ounces (60 ml.) of heated (not boiled) whole milk, sweetened with a single packet of Sugar in the Raw (optional). Recommended methods for brewing espresso: (a) a Nespresso coffee maker, using a capsule of 'Ristretto'; (b) a 'moka' espresso maker, using illy beans you grind yourself. Of course, if you're happy with what you're drinking now, stick with it. But, if you're at the mercy of chain baristas and not pleased with it, give this short latte a try. (I just thought it was too good to wait any longer to share it.)

And what does it have to do with writing in general and Balzac in particular? I'll 'connect it up' another day.... And, yet another day, the 'skinny' on one of my friends' faves, using a Nespresso frother and skim milk....

Unforeseen Convergences

It's Saturday morning, first light, and my body is still processing last night's gator tail appetizer, sour-orange-and-chocolate pie, and everything in between. Unforeseen convergences: when we got married a month ago today, we never would have thought that putting our names together into a search engine would turn up, as the first hit, a Kiss Before You Leave Me page at a site devoted to e-books for Sony Reader. (We've always been a Kindle household. But, since my last post, Kiss has become available at Smashwords in all the non-Kindle e-book formats.) There's even an adult-content warning (so marriage doesn't mean the end of raciness--what a relief!) before you get the first 29 pages of the book and a link to more.... And here's one more convergence: today's the one-month anniversary of our wedding and the one-week anniversary of Kiss for Kindle. Can you blame me for celebrating a little?