I am writing because today I had a good day. I saw my sister, which went surprisingly well. Nothing ugly was said on either way, and Mom was pleasant, too. I did–before my sister came–have a substantial case of the “lazies.” However, after Gayle, her daughter Amanda, and a third person came (and that third person left early), we went to Abuela’s, and though I broke Kosher to eat a steak, I was happy. I spoke to Amanda about my current projects in writing: I am putting up Oz Revisited for now to work on The Firebird Unchained and an as yet unnamed story about Stalin’s Ukraine.
With all this in mind, I have read to page 676 in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and shall read till page 700 this evening. With this in mind, the book is roughly 1215 pages, and I believe I can have it read by next Saturday.
On Saturday and Sunday, I hope to read from The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (676 pages). On the Monday after tomorrow, I shall begin Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (462 pages). When I am finished with Crime and Punishment I shall get back to Twain… and so on until yet another Monday… and so on.
I hope to get my “research” done quickly… but I have fears that it shall not be done on time… and my anti-Trump satire (Faust in Love) has already been “sold”; I hope it shall be on the book shelves somewhere soon. This book is 39 Chapters “because 40 is the number of completion and this story has yet to find an ending–only those living contemporary of the book can determine the ending of the book.
However, if the ending has not come, my own private life “is not the end but the beginning of an end” and I am feeling much better than I have for this last week.