Tales from the Dark Side only, please.
So, howdy, Henshaw.
Somehow I ended up spending the one free day I have during the week doing teaching preparation things: grading papers, planning the next units in both classes and. And. And that’s about it. If-they-knew-would-they-care-no.

Meanwhile, the highlight of the whole day?

Receiving in the mail from Powells, my very own copy of The Last Great Necessity, this stellar history of cemeteries in the United States. I had a copy from the school library and took so very many separate notes in a separate notebook that it was just ridiculous. All like, “pg. 90: Victorian sensibilities/diff. Puritans.” “Pg. 91: Cemetery cave-in/Paris!” Notes like this for every single page. The book rules so hard that I knew I had to buy it but then discovered it was out of print and therefore goddamned expensive and so changed my mind.

But then I changed it back again, Henshaw. Because I’m damn fickle in my affections, that’s why. Or just have Youngest Child Syndrome, and find it hard to turn down my own cravings.
Actually, the first one can’t be true. This thesis-deal requires obsession, which I’m actually frighteningly good at. Heh. Um, heh.

Now that I’ve sent any potential suitors among you running, the rest of us can talk. See, it doesn’t matter. The thesis is like Christine the evil Stephen King car. No other love allowed. Seriously: I’ve been reading nothing else. I come across as a complete moron to my fiction-writing MFA friends at parties. I complained to a professor that I hadn’t found a way to balance the good fiction I enjoy so much with the death-practice reading, and she said, “You can’t. You just can’t. When I’m researching, I have a completely monogamous relationship with my topic.”
Still, I’m sneaking some Harpers and George Saunders essays in on the side. Shh! Don’t tell!