I had to quit, for the time being, with Vows. Library renewal was two days away, and because I am immersing myself in other readings, I couldn’t justify keeping the book on retainer. I liked what I read of it. Manseau’s witness to a human cost to the Catholic church’s twentieth-century policies of sex is poetic in its evocation of moment; his discussion is thorough to policy, sympathetic to character. It is a book to which I intend to return.

I am immersing myself in environmental studies, effective advocacy, and discussions of grant writing—all of which are relevant to my interview, which is now twenty days away. I finished Robert Glennon’s Water Follies yesterday. Laws regulating groundwater use (and abuse) haven’t changed significantly in 200 years, despite the invention of pumps which can suck whole rivers dry in a few years. Egregious examples of water’s misuse exist not only in the West, where water was always scarce and is moreso now, but also in the east, as when Tampa Bay, Florida, pumps dry whole lakes, or when pumps to water golf courses alongside the Ipswich River in Massachusetts cause the river to disappear. Now I’m reading Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination, and I highly anticipate Stephen Hart’s Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics. It’s going to be a busy twenty days.

I am disappointed, however, because two-thirds of the books I checked from the library today have proofreading mistakes in the table of contents. John R. E. Bliese’s The Greening of Conservative America misses an s in the sentence, “Environmentalist Are Pagan Nature Worshipers; Christians Cannot Be Environmentalists,” a major subsection of Chapter 1 and an error that carries over to the subtitle within the chapter. Meanwhile, The Palgrave Environmental Reader, a small anthology of primary environmental studies texts, gets the name of one of its sources wrong. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac rivals Silent Spring as a seminal text of ecology. Why, then, would any anthology reprinting portions of it call it the Sand Country Almanac? (FYI, the bibliographic citation gets the title right.) I had heard that proofreading was a lost art—well, make that just lost—to publishing houses these days, but are these examples not egregious?

Finally, J, you’re reading Hunger’s Bride? I noticed the book, by sheer virtue of its heft, several months ago when I wandered into Prairie Lights, but I don’t think I ever noticed it was about Sor Juana. I think I was too overwhelmed to notice. I marveled at it as it lay, an iceberg, on the shelf: it’s almost… unseemly for a contemporary writer to attempt 1,300 pages, a gaudy display of verbosity without even serialization’s assist. At the same time, I realized that the subtitle, “A novel of the baroque,” might make the whole endeavor forgiveable—or it might not. How is it?

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