I forgot to say I abandoned Testament of Youth (Vera Brittain's memoir of growing up before, through and after World War One) even though I felt like both a traitor to the sisterhood and a real jerk doing so.
I ground it out all the way to the end of Mary Gabriel's Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, not because I liked it (or them) but because I was learning a lot about a subject I turned out to know woefully little about.
I flew through Madeline Miller's debut novel The Song of Achilles, a retelling of the Iliad that focuses on the love story between Achilles and Patroclus (which I loved, until it realised it had Twilight overtones - though at least A and P have it off frequently - at which point I was overcome with doubts).
And I also ripped through the first book in George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, which was pretty much exactly what I expected, with less sex, and didn't really need me to add my opinions to the overflowing seas of opinion and intrigue which surrounds it.
Now on the go: Stephen Greenblatt's 'The Swerve' (taking the place of the essay collections I originally twigged, because the library delivered it up faster than expected). And made happy by the news that there's a new Michael Chabon coming out this year, I think I'm going to re-read 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union', which is, I think, my favourite of his books (after 'Summerlands').
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