Kal lent me Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, which is so far an inoffensive story peppered with some Jane observations I had never considered before, such as the set-up of Sense and Sensibility as the opposite of a fairy-tale (a kind stepmother abused by her nasty stepdaugher-in-law).
Scarf, Kal, Harrison, and London (and I) were the only ones who liked Wide Sargasso Sea. At least everyone loved The Golden Compass last year, and I know my priorities. Someone new attended, someone whom Scarf collected on "the walk." I asked about her dog, but Scarf said it was the baby walk. Oh. The new person does not, in fact, have a dog because of an allergic husband. I refrained from blurting that allergies are for the weak, because I figure I should at least choose a book that more than half of us like before inflicting my perverse ideology on especially a new person.
In two weeks London has a piano recital that she invited us all to, and I am slightly torn--just a tiny rip--because at the Tattered Cover that night is a reading by both a DU professor we know and, uh, the UConn equivalent of its poet laureate during my tenure. Another UConn writer I knew spoke of him scathingly--"You mention his poetry and you can see the bulge in his pants rise"--and I am, still, crippled by nostalgia. I liked him, or at least one of his poems, well enough once to transcribe it into my poetry journal. But I'll probably go hear London instead.
Speaking of the Tattered Cover, the Lowenstein project got a third tenant, an independent cinema, with a café! Retail and entertainment: maybe this thing will survive.