Yom Kippur assortment

-UChicago's grand tradition of producing graduate students, confirmed.

-Unlike apparently everyone else on Goodreads, but like the friend who recommended it to me in the first place, I really enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot. I'd read and liked Middlesex a while back, but don't remember it well enough to compare the two. What inspired me to read it now was how often "the marriage plot" came up in my dissertation defense, and it started to occur to me that I had only the most general sense of what that meant. (Jane Austen, etc.)

What I hadn't known - and what may have made me like the book slightly less - was how much of the thing would be set, like, right where I was sitting as I read most of it. No, not just in the same town. The same academic community's housing. I hadn't had any idea that Eugenides lived in this town, but knowing that he does, it makes much more sense. What's the opposite of 'escapist'? Is it time for me to discover science fiction?

-Given that at least one of my readers comes here for lipstick discussions, let me state for the record that the Bite Beauty lipstick in Pomegranate is the perfect red. Less because of the shade - they all look more or less alike - than because of the texture. Goes on great, but more importantly, fades to a tint, rather than to bits of red lipstick clumping on chapped-ness you hadn't known you had, and that might well have been created by the lipstick itself. And blended with the dark 1990s red, becomes the perfect Carrie Brownstein shade.