E made me a reading spot in the bedroom where I promptly, before he’d even finished installing the lamp over my head, slipped back into Haruki Murakami’s After Dark and full-on devoured it. Even though I was sitting before a sunlit window—here, you can see my new view of the fire escape and parking garage behind our building, and look! we have a tree—I felt the deep night of the story swirl around me. It’s a sliver of a novel, just the right size for me at the moment.

Now that I’m done with that book, I want something else. I’d gone to the bookstore earlier to browse and sat reading in the nice spot beside the Nabokov to cheer myself up, but then I was bad and bought myself something: Granta‘s Best of Young American Novelists 2. I’m going to be good and start reading it, perhaps in my very own window seat, right now.