Aixa de la Cruz is a young Basque writer. Very talented, just outstanding. This is a crisis novel that is simultaneously a female Bildungsroman, and as if that weren’t enough to bring me into reading paradise, it also has ETA and Basque nationalism in it. Every single box on my list of research interests is checked. It’s creepy. Plus, the novel is very well-written.

I’m very, very impressed. This is a good reading year for me. I’m discovering fantastic new writers both in the serious literature I read and in the mystery / police procedural genre I read for fun. (I also just finished a debut mystery by a writer called Lexie Elliott, and I enjoyed it inordinately.)

At noon today, a man was yelling into a loudspeaker in the middle of the quad, exhorting us to stop fornicating because it offends the Holy Spirit. He sounded so urgent that you might think he was in the midst of an orgy. It’s blistering hot, and I was starting to worry about the fellow’s health he was so perturbed by imminent fornication.

Yes, Anita Hill’s charges against Clarence Thomas were investigated by the FBI. But people in the mushy, apolitical middle don’t remember that.

So they were but she and Thomas both worked for a federal agency when the harassment occurred. Investigating federal employees for activities while on the job makes sense. An investigation of a teenage drunken party by the FBI does not. It simply sounds ludicrous.