WTDK will be #16 on the Times list on April 29th, but without an asterisk. So no printed list, but I'm very pleased that I held my position even as four new books hit the list for that week. To recap: In five weeks, the book has spent three weeks on the printed list, two on the extended, as high as #10 and as low as #24. This is far better than I ever expected.

The next 10 days will be the toughest on my calendar, with a lot of travel and events. But as of April 30th, this tour comes to and end. Almost, sort of. (I have six events in May, but only one requires air travel and none of them requires packing a bag.) By the second week of May, classes at Goucher end as wel. Summer stretches ahead of me with only one item on the calendar for all of July and August. (An aside about Goucher: At the reception last night before my reading, the chair of the English department told me about a course in which they read Moby Dick at the pace of twenty pages a week. Doesn't that sound wonderful? But she said it was so intense that she doesn't plan to do it again for another year or so.)

Which is a good thing, because there's the matter of this book I'm trying to write. I had an inspiration on the treadmill the other day, however, that is going to solve some of my problems. The e-mail I sent myself upon returning home, so I wouldn't forget, read: "Mildred Pierce! Mildred Pierce! Mildred Pierce!" But it refers only to the novel, not the screen version.

What novel would you like to read twenty pages at a time, over the course of a semester?