Hello! I’ve returned from a brief hiatus.  Not that I was out of town or anything – I haven’t left New York since the summer, save for a brief apple-picking excursion.  Funny how time can expand and contract like that.  November felt excruciatingly long, just as this eventful year has breezed past in the blink of an eye, leaving us dazed in December.

As with my fellow bloggers, I will be very grateful when this semester draws to a close so I have time to stare blankly into the distance rather than read/write furiously every week (or at least attempt discipline amid much distraction).

Anyway, these days I am reading the latest installment in a very wonderful series of books by Armistead Maupin.  Maupin originally wrote serial fiction for The San Francisco Chronicle back in the 1970s, and his works were eventually collected into several volumes entitled Tales of the City.  The stint lasted into the next decade and produced six books in total, populated by a colorful cast of characters eking out a livelihood in the wacky and sexually diverse metropolis that was/is San Francisco.

More recently, he’s published two new books that bring back some of his most memorable protagonists – now in their fifties or older.  It’s pretty fluffy material, to be honest, but Maupin is adroit at weaving a full and eccentric world for his narratives to unfold.  I’m almost done with Mary Ann in Autumn, and, admittedly, I’m getting through it a bit faster than I did with Alice Munro’s dramatic-female-psychological-tension-in-small-town-Canada stories!