I, Claudius, pt. 3

Using Mucinex. Sick since Wednesday. On Thursday, as the temperature was climbing into the forties, Martin and I enjoyed an unexpected snow day. I slept all morning, on the couch.

Tomorrow it will be truly cold, and I expect to be Snowed In again.

Shoppers have been crowding the grocery stores, buying food for this snowstorm and for tonight’s Super Bowl parties. (Ah, yes, the Super Bowl. My policy is to boycott football, but I’ll watch this game.)

Edoarda wants to read I, Claudius — Stephen and I have persuaded her. Our enthusiasm for the book is undiminished, though we haven’t read much more of it. Last night I did get through two other chapters. There were a few more poisonings, and some suicides and banishments (for variety). But not everything was awful. There was a lovely account of little Claudius’s education (in particular, of his earliest forays into historiography). Claudius’s tutors were shrewdly described.

My first Kindle purchase, for my smartphone: Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete ($0.00). Let’s see how much I read of that book.

I, Claudius, pt. 2

If you haven’t read much of I, Claudius, don’t despair. You can catch up. Stephen and I haven’t gotten very far. Not because the book isn’t good (it is!) but because Stephen’s life is very full, and so he hasn’t had time for reading; and because I lost my copy and found it only yesterday. So I’m still on Chapter V, and Stephen is on Chapter 3. (Stephen’s edition has Arabic chapter numerals; mine, more fittingly, has Roman ones.) So far, in the novel, Livia — Augustus’s wife, Claudius’s grandmother — has been poisoning many of the other characters. Just when it feels like the story is turning to something else, Gasp!, another poisoning. (This is Stephen’s summary.) I’ve also been reading some rather garish short stories by Ruth Rendell, who appears to have been, for a time, the most similar writer to Agatha Christie. And I’ve been reading a lot of other books and some philosophy articles. This was interesting and accessible, I thought (before yesterday, I’d never read it).

Also, these last weeks I’ve weighed more lbs than ever. And today I’m groggy due to illness. Still chipper, though.

The underworld

Another long interlude between blog entries.

The newest project of the Stephen-and-John-Paul Book Club is I, Claudius by Robert Graves, two chs/day. Read it with us. Today is just the second day. So far, the book is a hoot.

Yesterday I resumed my tutoring job at IUSB. I tutored zero tutees. This morning, at my highschool job, I discovered the building’s basement. It has offices and classrooms and a largish student population. For all I know, it may be the first circle of the school’s underworld: there may be a sub-basement; there may be a sub-sub-basement; there may be no end to the basements.

(I was warned about the woman I was sent to. Volatile was how she was described. But this morning, she was nice enough.)