Over the years we have really gotten into alternative tree toppers, and this year’s is some sort of Pokeymans, I don’t know which kind. But the tree is up. There have been years when we haven’t bothered; I don’t think we had one last year, and three cats in the house means that we’ve forgone ornaments for pretty much the entire time we’ve lived here. Also, yes, that’s an artificial tree, because people who bring real trees into their houses for Christmas are lunatics, and yes, I’ll die on that hill.

The lights are controlled by an app, and do all sorts of fun stuff, only some of which looks like it’ll trigger epileptic seizures if we leave it running for too long. They’re pretty though.

Anyway.

I had to give up on a John Irving book this weekend, which I find immensely frustrating. I’ve read nearly all of his work, excepting only his nonfiction and … maybe? a short story collection that I’m not sure actually exists? But I’ve read all of his novels, at least, or I had, up until The Last Chairlift came out. Irving has always been an author who really, really liked his repeating tropes over his body of work, but this book– his first in seven years– reads more like a parody of a John Irving book than it does an actual John Irving book– as if someone much less skilled than him read all his stuff and then tried to write a book in his voice. It took me a week to get through the first three hundred pages out of like 870 or something, I didn’t care at all about what was going on, and then I hit the part where the POV character (who is, of course, another writer) started including long segments of his screenplays in the text of the novel, and that was where I decided I had to be done. The worst thing is this may very well be Irving’s last novel; he’s 81 and if it took him seven years to write this one, I don’t see another coming out anytime soon.

On to a Kevin Hearne book, which isn’t much shorter and I’ll probably finish in three or four days. The Seven Kennings series has been great so far and I suspect he’ll stick the ending.