Confession

I'm having some trouble quitting P.D. James. I usually like to vary my reading, hopping from popular nonfiction about condiments or unlikely professions to Victorian novels mostly of interest only to women's studies majors to the kind of unabashed chick lit that heavily features brand-name shopping, if only to keep my Goodreads followers guessing.

However, I have read almost nothing but Adam Dalgliesh mysteries for the last month and a half, and I have gone through eight of them, which I think is officially compulsive. I am kind of diffidently an Anglophile, super-excited about the royal engagement, etc., and James' mysteries are so British that she's been made a baroness by the Queen just for writing them. But they're British less in a charming, country cottage, God Save the Queen kind of way than in a deadpan, dirty Thames, National Health Service kind of way. And our hero is a lugubrious policeman/poet who is not very likable, although he's very good at figuring out what's afoot. He himself is often afoot.

This whole Adam Dalgliesh situation is wreaking havoc with my plan to take nothing but the Kindle on our winter vacation to Mexico. Only the last four are available on the Kindle, so I need to get through two and a half in the next 10 days while applying furiously to grad schools, raising a child, and stamping out ignorance 40 hours a week.