Another mouse

We aren’t very sick anymore. I have to blow my nose a lot, but that’s the extent of it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Last night, we saw a mouse in our basement. Get it, Jasper!, we said.

A little later, we saw our champion mouser trotting along, his mouth full, a bit of brown fuzz dangling out of it. Karin followed after Jasper with an empty potato-salad container. He tried to escape into one of his hidey-holes to play with his prize, but Karin caught him and he grudgingly released the limp thing.

It was a plastic toy. The bit of fuzz was a dust bunny. We didn’t see the mouse again.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This, at last, is shaping up to be the August when I read all of Light in August.

Some more August reading:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The Merchant of Venice.

Operation Mincemeat, by Ben Macintyre.

Storm, by George R. Stewart.

Something crime-ey as soon as I wind up The Dain Curse.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ana & David and their children, Ada and George, will be in town from Saturday to Saturday.

Sally Rooney; body-text fonts, pt. 6: Garth Graphic

This is another August when I’ll fail to read Light in August. Instead, I’ll finish my second Sally Rooney novel. (No, I haven’t seen the TV episodes, which are reputed to be steamy.) I’m pretty sure Rooney is the youngest novelist I’ve read – the youngest, as in, the most recently born; not as in, the youngest to write a novel. That person is Daisy Ashford.

Rooney is less jaundiced than Ashford was at age nine. But you can sense Rooney inching toward disillusionment. These are her novels’ titles: Conversations with Friends; Normal People; Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Rooney’s pacing is propulsive. Her scenes are tautly constructed. Her protagonists make me feel like an old fogy: I spend most of the time feeling sorry for them. I suppose that for a lot of her fans, her blank young men and, especially, her aloof young women are personal reference points, imaginary peers for modeling oneself after or for suffering with or for projecting one’s self-conception onto. Some books lend themselves to that sort of thing. Jane Eyre is a fine example, carefully and richly realized though Jane and Rochester are as characters.

As much as I like Jane Eyre, I don’t read that way anymore: I stopped around age thirty-two or thirty-three. Sally Rooney is thirty-one.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Now, this month’s mini-essay on the typefaces in my books.

One doesn’t often see this font used for setting body text. Which is too bad!

Look at those inconspicuous commas and apostrophes. Look at those very conspicuous, asymmetically serifed, lower-case ys. Look at those interrogation marks, and the big, spiky serifs on the Gs: were I a fly fisherman, this is the font I’d choose.