I spent Saturday catching up – sending emails, confirming work, and catching up most of all with the magazine of which I am an editor and which had some lingering matters I’d been putting off in the general swirl of work. Otherwise, a fairly uninteresting day, with one great tragedy: my favourite cake shop no longer delivers to Galata.
I finished Richard Power’s The Overstory, and have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I did admire the ambition, and the stuff about trees was really interesting. On the other hand, I always bristle at self-consciously Great Novels, the characters were poor (and the non-white characters troubling), they and the plot were in the service of the Message, and occasionally it was just a bit silly. Well, I’m glad I read it, and I would like to climb to the top of a redwood. Perhaps the most delightful thing about the book is that it is being turned into a TV series by the showrunners of the Game of Thrones.