So it's the New Year and I'm actually ahead in my reading of Shakespeare and the Bible. If you recall, I pledged only to read a page of each, every night, but I'm ahead because I read a great deal of Genesis in December, then started A Comedy of Errors and found that it's very hard to read just one page of Shakespeare. But not in the Lays potato chip way, I hasten to add. It's just that once I get my Shakespeare vibe up and running, I don't want to stop in a page. So I'm well into the second act of Errors and am confident I will finish it before I attend a production in D.C. this weekend.

Meanwhile, I'm also halfway through Kings of Infinite Space and Lonely Hearts, which I'd somehow missed. (Why am I halfway through two books? Because I forgot to pack Lonely Hearts for my trip to New Orleans, so I bought Kings of Inifinite Space. I also purchased Two Girls, Fat and Thin, but it's not the right book at the right time. It will be, and soon. Just not now.) My admiration for John Harvey is so profound that I just assumed I had already read this book, the first in his Charlie Resnick series. But, as it often happens, I had started in the middle and never gone back for the first book. (I don't think I've read The Godwulf Manuscript to this day.) Oh, and I read The Woman at the Washington Zoo, in part because Marjorie Williams' posthumous piece in Vanity Fair made me cry.

And if you want to read about some of my favorite crime novels of 2005, check out www.lauralippman.com.

Happy New Year, y'all.