Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker had a mad on at Los Angeles for the last 20 years or so. It was the sort of grudge you can only hold against someone you love, someone whom you feel has let you down. Someone who has become something bad while somehow remaining, inexplicably, themselves.

A lot of it was due to Los Angeles’ determined fling with dystopia in the 1980’s and ’90’s. Everything old was being torn down. Green space was vanishing. Riots came back in fashion. We had to flee our office one day to avoid the fires marching up Western Avenue as the Rodney King protests turned to insanity – we spent 4 days holed up in the Hollywood Hills, trying not to notice our neighbors patrolling the streets with air rifles and Yorkies on leashes (I am serious); watching as the shops we had known since childhood were broken and burned … not fancy shops, either. But when the Hollywood Sears and Roebuck burned, Kage wept as for the death of an old friend. During those awful days, we couldn’t visit Momma, where she was dying of pancreatic cancer. The streets weren’t safe, and she forbade our going out. And when it was all over and life could have been expected to return to normal – Momma died.

That was the end for Kage. She was no longer on speaking terms with the city of our birth, and began to talk yearningly of leaving. And then, of course, just to make things really mythic, our employer downsized and fired everyone. Thus began our long, happy years on the road, in the car, in the oak woods, on the beach … nowhere else we lived pissed Kage off, so it was all grand. She said rude things about LA when we visited, and always ritually washed her hands of it when we would head back North.

And then Kage died. And the City of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels was waiting just beyond the southern horizon, as weird as ever but somehow comforting; a slightly blowsy goddess in deshabille, half the staff let go but still serving tea on the really good china … home again. I haven’t regretted a moment of my return.

Not even this morning, when I decided to drive to UCLA by taking Sunset – a moment of misplaced romanticism immediately swamped in insane traffic. On the good side, though, the traffic was so slow that one had plenty of time to observe the crowds, the cars, the buildings, the art, the movie shoots and construction messes and exotic vegetation – some of all and each of them seem to have dropped in from an alternate Universe, but it was so damned interesting!

It was fun to drive through the neighborhoods where Kage and I were children, teenagers, young women flirting endlessly with idiocy – how such a feckless pair as we were survived, I do not know. The Sunset Strip must have been a nicer place  then … not as elegant, I think, but maybe safer. Or maybe we were just protected, like the dappled young of deer, by the fact that we were wandering in our native habitat. Morons we may have been (no, there’s no question, we really were) but we were blissfully invisible and knew all the hidden, secret forest paths …

Turns out I still know some of them. I managed to dodge half a dozen construction sites, tourist busses, crowds of gaping tourists, and all the Angelenos obliviously talking and texting while they drove (and occasionally getting pulled over, ha ha ha, I jeer at you as I drive by!) I remembered the side and back roads that skip one like a stone through the clogged freeways, and most of what I remembered was even still there!

Kage’s memory rode beside me, advising me where and when to turn (South! That means Right! A block ago!). She’s a smokeless flame now, a djinn from a bottle by the side of the Sepulveda Pass – one pearled opaque with decades of sunlight, grown over  with the tiny sunflowers that smell of strawberry incense, with a faded ribbon from a Faire costume twined around its neck …

Kage Baker was fascinated with hybridization. I have no idea why – maybe because she was the second-oldest of a whole mess of children, and may have suspected Momma and Daddy were trying for a new species. Maybe because any girl with brothers comes to wonder if they aren’t changelings or subhuman throwbacks. Maybe because she loved plants.

Plants are madly promiscuous. So are humans.  And so hybridization has been the fastest route to plant speciation ever since humans got involved in the process several thousand years ago. We actively encourage this kind of behaviour in our plants. It’s usually arranged marriages between two kinds of wheat or a couple of nice young citrus trees, but every culture in the world has devised enthusiastic rituals that require copulation in the fields. And even if that copulation is not actively with the rightful inhabitants of those fields (sometimes it is), the open house orgies are intended to promote fertility among the crops – by example, if nothing else.

Humans are apparently hard-wired for hybridization, unusually so for a vertebrate (though lizards are pretty into it as well). The fossil evidence has been hinting ever-more strongly over the decades that hominids enjoyed active social intercourse with any available cousins, and now genomic evidence is unquestioningly backing that up. Humans will screw anything – and apparently it’s been the family style for millions of years.

Until about 30,000 years ago, there seem to have always been multiple species of hominid wandering around the planet. And whenever they met – they interbred. That intrigued Kage. For one thing, it’s a nicer image than the one of various hominids habitually eating one another instead – Kage didn’t like that killer ape machismo. It was her guess that clear-cut missing links were hard to find in the fossil records because the participants in the evolutionary line kept blurring the edges. How can you get a nice crisp line between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens when they keep leaving hybrids behind? Plus, there’s always that one family in the valley over, who’s grandmother is just obviously of habilis origins …

When faced with the question of whether or not a potential partner is human, the answer of the average hominid has usually been: Who cares? For some reason, that reassured Kage – she said the continuity of human nature was clearly very old indeed, and based on sex rather than violence. She felt that was a hopeful indication of the basic healthiness of humanity.

She would be delighted right now, as it has just been verified that a sizeable portion of modern humans shows signs of a menage a trois in their genome. And not only our dear old cousins the Neanderthals (a cross Kage was convinced of years ago) have been restored to the family guest list. There is now a hitherto-unknown recent hominid, the Denisovans, who seem to have hung out in Siberia before heading to sunnier climes – their DNA is most prevalent now in folks from New Guinea and Melanesia. I think if I had evolved in Siberia, I’d have headed for the South Seas as soon as I could, too …

Now: on a note vaguely connected to hominid hybridization, did you know there were two broad categories of bats?  There are, and this interested Kage, too. Simplistically, there are micro-bats – the wee guys with goblin faces and noses like orchids on acid; and the macro-bats – flying foxes, and other less startling-looking critters. And there is quite a size differential between the two.

There has long been a theory bruited about that macro bats might be more related to primates than anything else – the primate attempt at flight, as it were. The theory is based on bone structure, dietary habits, choice of eyes, and , um, genital placement. Macro-bats have theirs front and center, like primates, and in fact tend to couple face to face …

Also, pretty widely, apparently. The dominant bat on one Caribbean island turns out to be a triple hybrid – there was considerable hanky-panky in some rookery a while back, and the resultant blend has prospered. Very hominid sort of behaviour, really. Doesn’t prove a thing, of course – gene analysis will be needed for that – but it’s still amusing and interesting:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/01/holy-hybrids-batman-caribbean-fruit-bat-is-a-mash-up-of-three-species/

This is just the sort of thing Kage liked. She liked it better in plants – she really, really liked plants – but mammalian foibles are amusing, too. And enlightening. And educational. And who would not rather think we didn’t brain or eat our cousin humans long ago, but instead asked them over for the night?

I mean, if bats can show that much sense …

Kage Baker, as I have said before, loved heat. As long as she could strip down in the privacy of her home, sit in a breeze, somehow get all that hair off the back of her neck, and have an endless supply of cold drinks to hand. Fans, ice, rum, Coca-Cola and really, really big hair pins usually took care of most of her requirements. Then, even while I melted into a whining pool of self-pitying sludge, she would put Falla’s El Amor Brujo on infinite repeat and write like a madwoman …

Want to hear some Mendoza music? El Amor Brujo is some primo stuff. The entire piece is pure Mendoza (with bits of Joseph here and there) but the “Danza Ritual de Fuego” is the soundtrack of Mendoza’s journey through the L.A. Basin and the Hollywood Hills with Edward – desperately racing to Wilmington, to charter a doomed boat to Catalina Island …

There is lots of other Mendoza music, of course – including a weird sinister little waltz from one of the Monkey Island games. Kage painstakingly made a 45-minute disc of that waltz and nothing else and listened to it endlessly. Oh, and Synchronicity by the Police: why, neither of us ever figured out, but it is utterly entwined with Garden of Iden.

It’s pushing 100 degrees in portions of Los Angeles today (anywhere I go, apparently). Sitting in my darkened room in Kimberly’s stucco house, it’s not too bad – we have fans on, doors open where the trees shade them, and plans for mango sherbet later on. I have my own hair pinned up under headphones, so I can listen to Rimsky-Korsakof’s Scheherezade: which is the ultimate summer music for me.

It’s also the ultimate music for Kage herself, her whole introspective, cast-of-thousands memories, fire in the head self. The repeating motif in “The Story of Kalendar Prince” – horns, harps, flutes, oboes, violins, each in their turn repeating in a different mood and tempo – that is most particularly Kage. It’s also the music behind the very first stories in the Anvil Universe, created and told to me on hot days just like this, under the netted fish leaves of the eucalyptus in the back yard.

Her hands moved when she talked. Especially when she told stories – those who saw her read at cons or signings might remember. She was even more animated when just telling tales, as she liked to do around the fire on camping trips: I saw all of it, but I can share the memory as well with the select few she chose to enchant: Becky, Wayne, Kelly, Neassa, Tom, Stacy, all those hardy veterans of the nights at China Lake where we carved turnips and ate home-made marshmallows, and listened to Kage tell stories of the jealousy of the sea.

I remember how her hands moved through the rhythms of Scheherezade. There are stories in those memories, of the children of Gard and the Lady, of the rise (and fall) of their house, of its eventual resurrection through the auspices of the Children of the Sun. There are crazy stories of nymphs and lava storms, of cliffs where molten gold falls into the steaming sea to create gilded reefs, of interesting places like the Ash Hills or the haunted City in the Ice. There are even crazier stories of what happens when Lord Ermenwyr takes up the life a merchant and joins the local Chamber of Commerce …

I would say more, but … my computer has gone down three times while I have written this, felled by the heat. I need a dedicated fan in my desk. At the moment, I am writing on the Buke and paranoidly saving at the end of every sentence.

So I shall leave you here, Dear Readers, and go fan shopping. Play yourselves some hot weather music, and imagine doomed lovers galloping through the sage brush desolation of the Los Angeles Basin; or Lord Ermenwyr choosing the menu for the annual Resteraunters’ Award Dinner. Have a Pimm’s Cup and a Fudgesickle.

Kage would.

Kage Baker remains one of my enduring sources of wisdom. That’s easier to do once a person is dead, of course – they stop making new mistakes, all those little errors and faux pas that dilute the accumulated intelligence of a life time.

Me, I go right on doing things like forgetting where I wake up and rolling out of my sleeping bag – only to noisily fall flat on my face because I’m actually sleeping in a tall box bed … or deciding to boil eggs in the microwave (they explode). My moments of brilliance and acuity are therefore somewhat eclipsed by those other moments; the ones where I have to call home for a ride when I run out of gas because I somehow confused the temperature dial with the gas gauge. Or cleverly get both feet in the same leg of my jeans. In the dark. Behind a locked bathroom door …

Not that Kage did not have those other moments as well. She had as many as any, and more than most – when you are both creative and absent-minded the chance of, say, a grotesque paint brush accident  increases. (Kage used to carelessly dip her brush in her Coke. And then sip from her paint water.) She pulled portable drives out of her computer without saving so often that I stuck CAUTION flags over the ports. She liked to line up all her shoes beside the bed, or down one wall of the hall, or alongside the bathtub; I cannot count the white canvas deck shoes I have fallen over.

Now, of course, these simple endearing disasters no longer happen. And to tell the truth, I do not actually miss her habit of opening the new bread, or milk or bottle of Worchestershire as soon as we got one: regardless of whether or not the old one was used up (I’m tired of the old one, she would protest. ) But despite not missing it, despite being pleased when I can throw away an empty bottle before opening a full one, I would give anything to be faced once again with 6 or 8 ends of loaves furtively stashed in the bread box …

I started today’s maunderings with the intent of segueing to a bitingly cogent analysis of how badly lots of people are behaving about the death of Osama bin Laden. No American is anything but relieved the man is gone, but most of us are nonetheless criticizing everyone else about admitting it. No matter how joyful the triumphant capering or how noble the stern regret being expressed, someone else is pointing accusingly and yelling “You’re doing it wrong!”

Kage would have looked at all this and quoted Warwick from Henry VI, Part III, as the Plantagenet princes gloat over a deceased enemy: “Aye, my lords – but he’s dead.” And followed it, like as not, with a shrug and a wry, “Ain’t my planet, monkey boys.” She despised poseurs, especially political ones.

However, once I started writing, all my crankiness was dispersed in the vast ocean of my sorrow – nothing irritates me, no one can hurt me, no disaster can grieve me as much as the absence of Kage. I miss the wise things she would have had to say during these momentous days – I miss the wise-ass things she would have said, too. Hell, I miss her reaction to the new Subway chicken salad sandwich, and whether or not the cast of Jersey Shore are actually space aliens. I miss her cursing and laughing as she would have been last night, when I woke up the house under the hypnogogic impression that a lizard was crawling around in my bed … I only got back to sleep when the little black cat checked it all out and declared it lizard-free by curling up for a bath in the middle of my bed.

The wind through my porch door is heavy with the scent of camphor and wisteria, roses and ripening mulberries, cut grass and hot wet stone. A day like this … Kage would be pinning up her hair in the 90+degree heat (Badly. Futilely. Her hair was 4 feet long.), and breaking out her silk pajama tops to replace the weight of hot cotton tee-shirts. She’d be crushing ice for Pimm’s cups right now. We’d be having Haagen Daz and Ben & Jerry for dinner …

I am going to turn off the news, with its endless loop of dead foreign princes.  Aye, my lords – but he’s dead. Time to put on Scheherazade instead.

Kage Baker and I got our first glimpse of the World Trade Center buildings falling on our way to work that September morning. Our favourite little coffee shop had a tiny telly behind the counter, showing the footage as the first plane hit.

We thought it was a special effects preview of some movie. Took us a minute to realize it was real. And then the second tower went down as we drove, dazed, to work. Like everyone else, we had friends who lived in New York – it would be over a week before we had accounted for all of them, and we were lucky: they were all unharmed.

Kage said, “It doesn’t make any sense, but I keep thinking it would never have happened if Daddy was still alive.” (He had died a few months previously.) She said, “I have to be a grown up now, and this is like a dose of poison  in my adulthood.” She said, “The world just isn’t safe anymore.”

It never was, of course, but we all try to ignore that as much as we can: to dwell on it too much is a road to insanity. And the world isn’t really any safer today, with Osama bin Laden dead. But it feels a little safer, if only because that one particular viper will never bite anyone again. I can at least be sure of that.

I’m going to cling a little to that thought, as people get over their amazement at the news and resume snarling and calling names. Fox News has congratulated Bush. A half-dozen conspiracy theories are already spinning around this. The National Review thinks it was an act of arrogance for President Obama to announce the strike personally.

More people must have been avidly watching Celebrity Apprentice than I ever imagined …

Time to put my feet up and have another cup of coffee.

Kage Baker loved May Day. She always got up to wash her face in the morning dew – in her youth, especially at Faires, she would occasionally even strip off her shift and bathe in the dew – discreetly, behind the tent or the Inn, in the eredawn …

There is no dew this morning. There often isn’t – this is wind season in Southern California, and it’s been gusting all night. Usually a handful of rose petals has to suffice for the May Morn dew, but that’s a pretty good substitute.

All over the state, I know my friends were up at dawn to dance the May in. (I’ve done it myself, in younger and less reclusive years.) It makes my heart sing to know they are out there, with bells and scarves and sticks and beer and coffee, with lupin and roses and bee balm and wild poppies in their hair, conjuring summer in …

And now, old and stiff though I am, I’m off to the woods. Blessed Beltaine!

Kage Baker blew off a lot of  Saturdays. She had iron discipline and exemplary work habits – but she also lived with the thinnest of filters on her senses, and could be derailed by a determined sensory assault.

And Saturdays are so good at that! This one is warm, windy and clear – an ideal summer day. Mind you, it’s not summer yet – and when it is, the days will be grey and foggy and we won’t see the sun from Memorial Day to 4th of July. But as recompense, even with the insane climate changes, we get days like this. They come without warning, in any month on the calendar, and are not to be wasted. The only pretense at work I am making today is this time with you, Dear Readers.

When Kage and I were teenagers, we’d be up at dawn sometimes (Kage was, anyway; I likely had not yet been asleep) and zipping down Hollywood Boulevard on skateboards. Those glassy paving stones and brass-lined stars are superb to race over – and back then, there were neither skateboarders nor tourists enough to bother one another. We’d breakfast on pizza (25 cents a slice!) at Two Guys From Italy (fascinatingly weird; plastic grapes and empty fiascoes hanging from a ceiling made of wooden grating) and discuss in detail just how to waste a day too beautiful to spend on anything that made a lick of sense.

Though most of the world of Anvil grew out of those days … Kage worked on that nearly every day; we built the underpinnings of a universe on Hollywood Boulevard. I remember sitting in George’s – which used to be a snack stand at the corner of Hollywood and Yucca – demonstrating the orbital mechanics of a primary and satellite system to Kage with an orange and a crumpled milk carton. In reply, she designed the Children of the Sun.

Then we went off and read Andrew Lang’s coloured faerie tale books in the Ivar Library. Paragons of maturity, us.

As Walt Kelly (a god in Kage’s pantheon; more on him later) once remarked: “Break out the cigars, this life is for squirrels/We’re off to the drugstore to whistle at girls!”

Or boys. It was the whistling that mattered.

Kage Baker kept a calendar from 1968 on her wall until the day she died.

It was a calendar she especially loved (the Beatles, Yellow Submarine) and a year that had been one of her favourites. She called it the Year of the Perfect Summer, and when it ended – she just started the calendar over. From time to time, it was even accurate; in the off years, she could still point to given days and dates and remember beloved things that had occurred then, 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years agone …

This attitude was utterly native to Kage’s personality (as far as I could ever tell). She had a very personal and cavalier attitude regarding time, and it may have been inevitable that she would end up writing time-travel stories. She claimed steadfastly that she was not making up any of the physics (or metaphysics or uberphysics or astrophysics) in her tales – she was just reporting what she experienced.  Time, averred Kage Baker, is all happening at once, all the time, everywhere. Causality is a matter of choice and habit. What you see is up to you.

It might be helpful to bear in mind that her eyes looked in two directions simultaneously. Most of the time.

I’d have given a lot to get a look at her corpus callosum.

Lately, the basal date seems to be drifting in an especially Kageian way around here. The air, the light, the weather – all much more reminiscent of our childhood (when weather in LA was much odder than usual) than it has been in 30 years. The sky is blue in the daytime right down to the horizon, and one can see more than 6 stars at night – I used to count them, and on my average teen-aged night in Hollywood there were 6 visible stars. I didn’t see the Milky Way until I was in my 20’s.

Anyway, things seem to be circling around again. There was another Royal Wedding this morning, and I think you could have substituted the sound track from Charles’ and Diana’s faerie tale nuptials with no one noticing. Everyone behaved as if a prince had never before married a commoner on world-wide telly in front of an audiance of billions, for heaven’s sake! But it’s been 30 years.

My friends at the Renaissance Faire (at the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area in Irwindale through May 22nd) are having quarrels with the management over authenticity and tradition: should booth workers be expected to wear complete costumes? What’s the official stand on tennis shoes? Nose rings? Neon hair? This was a hot topic 10 years ago; 20 and 30 years ago, too. There were no answers then and there are apparently none now –  a talented and dedicated costumer has been fired, some fanatics will quit, some will stay and try to make the Faire as good as ever, and management will play all sides against the middle and rake in the dough.

They are counting potholes in Oakland. Again. They are fighting over water in the San Joaquin. Again. They are killing one another in South LA, East Asia, and all the fabled, minaret-crowned cities of the Levant – again, again, again.

What year is it? Damned if I know. But it doesn’t seem to be a very good one.

I’m think I’m gonna see if I can find that old 1968 calendar and hang it up again. Maybe Kage’s temporal magic will still work.

Kage Baker’s baleful aspect (yeah, she had one of those) is standing behind me, pointing like Longfellow’s spectral Viking at the desk (http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/12202), abjuring me to work on TWONG II.

Among the other things I have to do – besides make the corrections Linn-the-agent requested – is attach some of the niceties like a word count, a title page, and a dedication. In this case, I shall be sending a page with a list of potential titles – with thanks to all of you who send me suggestions over the last couple of days. I liked ’em all, personally! I can’t guarantee the publisher will, but giving him options is always a nice touch. Thank you all, Dear Readers!

In the meantime … the temperature is up in the ’80’s again here in Los Angeles, although we are told to anticipate a chance of rain in a couple of days. At the same time, the Santana winds are beginning to blow, and the first tentative brush fires have sparked hither and yon … any one of these phenomena would be normal on its own; the weird part is the rapid and unseasonal progression we are having this Spring.

Still, we aren’t having tornado fronts a mile wide sweeping through our cities here. The Midwest is besieged by weird weather, and I am grateful our own oddities are so far confined to hot weather and late rain. California is still a blessed land in many ways.

In the meantime – I have my porch door open to the lovely afternoon, and the perfumes of hot stone, roses and camphor trees are drifting in. My room had become the pet clubhouse: the little black cat is on my bed where the breeze from the door and the overhead fan can ruffle her tummy fur, Harry is singing softly to himself on his cage by my bed, and the Corgi is whuffling in his sleep in an attempt to convince me he is on duty …  even the Elder Cat is dozing in the hall, where she can stare out at the finches playing in the wisteria.

But it’s back to work for me! One edge of my mind is wondering about Denisovans and Neanderthals. Another is at work on TWONG II.

And yet another edge is looking at a rough tent of vizeo set up around the statue of the Marswife in the central plaza of Mars Two. The shelter is using her outstretched arms as supports. Behind the heat-blurred panels, a young woman stares out at the path of the pyroclastic flow that has ripped through the plaza and the edge of the Dome. It’s a few days after the bomb went off in the Olympus Mons Power Plant, and red dust is beginning to obscure dozens of black figures – all with their arms held to their breasts, all with their hands drawn up over their featureless charcoal faces.

There are Mars stories due …

Kage Baker originally intended the Ladies of Nell Gwynne’s to be an amusing walk on – a reward for the growing skills of novice operatives of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, and a foil for those young fellows’ outre talents. However, being Kage,  she got carried away by the intrinsic personalities among the Ladies themselves, and decided they needed more explication.  They won’t be silenced, she told me, they have something to say:  and the result was The Women of Nell Gwynne’s. It won her the Nebula last year.

In the last months of her life, Kage was working on a sequel to that story. She talked it out with me in detail, as was her long-standing habit; she left copious notes, as well. And she extracted from me a solemn promise to finish the story. In fact, she left me a frightening number of stories to complete – but the task was to begin with the sequel to Nell Gwynne.  Kage, being still at the silly names stage of the writing when she was compelled to lay it aside, called it Who We Did On Our Summer Holiday.

In it, the Ladies of that upscale and technologica-inclined brothel close their doors in order to go on their annual month of summer holidays. Proprietress Mrs. Corvey being fond of the seaside, the Ladies shift lodgings to a respectable family boarding house in Torquay : known as the English Riveria for its mild climate, warm seas and tourist amenities. The Ladies are more than ready for a happy month of sea-bathing, long walks, dancing, shopping, needlework and a little light archeology.

While there, however, they make the acquaintance of a most peculiar expatriate American, Mr. Treadway Pickett. He develops an importunate infatuation with Lady Beatrice; she is inclined to gently repulse him (the Ladies are enjoying their month of celibacy) but for the odd fact that he seems somehow connected to sudden reports of sea monsters in the area. These are chalked up to fancy and strong drink, except for some chance sightings of something odd from the sea cliffs by some of the Ladies, as well as a clear view of something very strange indeed by Mrs. Corvey’s customized ocular implants.

The Ladies not being prepared for work – they are on holiday, after all – Mrs. Corvey passes on the oddities to the Gentlemen’s Society. However, it transpires that the Red King’s Club is empty of most operatives, what with summer holidays, training exercises and the political foment of 1848 being helped along on the continent by the GSS – the Ladies are advised to please employ their spare time to observe, report and stand ready to take action regarding Mr. Pickett if needed.

Mrs. Corvey must coordinate all the clandestine activities, promote a discreet affaire de coeur between Lady Beatrice and Mr. Picket, and find a new cook (the old one has gotten religion and quit). Miss Rendlesham is attacked by gulls and butlers. Mrs. Otley finds an unknown Prediluvian skull, the Devere sisters are charming, and Herbertina makes the acquaintance of a dandy horse and a fox terrier.

There are steam cannons, floating gun platforms and hermaphrodite brigs. There are Spotted Dick and water ices. There are card palaces and castles in the clouds and a brief digression on the origin of carbon fibres. There is indeed a plot afoot, and the Ladies must solve it themselves since the GSS will arrive too late to do anything of note …

And I must tell, you Dear Readers, that I love all the titles you’ve suggested so far, and they are all going on the Suggestions List!