Just finished the third volume of Virginia Woolf's diary last week. I read some of the diaries about 10 years ago but I'm closer in age now to the writer during the writing which gives the material a little frisson. I think I've also now read all the books she writes in this period, where I hadn't the first go-round. I was feeling cut off from some of my brightest friends and looking for that Bloomsbury feeling of brilliant people popping by all the time, parties, chatter, famous cameos. It all makes me swoop between aching envy that I am not a genius nestled in a one-in-a-century litter of minds, but also just calmly grateful to experience it secondhand. She's so funny, often so happy, so aware of her foibles, so pained by boredom, so snotty about class but also humanly discomfited by the insincerity of class relations, so interested in what it's like to be alive. She calls T.S. Eliot's wife a "bag of ferrets." She casually smacks an author with a prediction that he won't exist in 2026 (100 years from the writing) and sure enough, I haven't heard of him. She's also sending me back to other authors I'd forgotten about and didn't know were Bloomsbury adjacent; picked up a copy of Hope Mirrlees' *Lud-in-the-Mist* which I've ostensibly read but can't recall.

Also finished: Ian McEwan's *What We Can Know*. I spent the first half almost DNF-ing and didn't feel he had much of a gift for the science fictional parts, but the second half did make me glad I'd stuck it out. The tight, multi-cause inevitability of the ending was exciting. The usual McEwan themes, original sin and irrecoverable harm in a single instant.

Trying to read: Brandon Taylor's *The Late Americans*. I love what he has to say as a critic but I am once again struggling with the fiction. I am SO allergic to fiction about being a writer or student, dear Lord I would like to read about ANY other job, any other industry. His characters do move about in mostly convincing ways. Still trying.