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Currently reading: Debussy: A Painter in Sound by Stephen Walsh. I'm about 2/3 of the way through this one, and so far, my feelings are... Well. Monsieur Debussy composed some very pretty piano music, but he seems to have been the sort of man who cheated on women and flaked out when it came to delivering on projects. He doesn't seem like the sort of person I'd get along with, heh. That said... his flakiness is somewhat interesting - the way he kept getting distracted by theatre projects that never came to fruition, which had a negative effect on his finances, and the way he was (apparently) obsessed with the idea of writing an opera based on The Fall of the House of Usher - there's something about all this, or the way Walsh describes all this, that makes him seem very ordinary and familiar. I think a lot of us have known people kind of like this.

Also currently reading: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I'm about 1/4 through this one. Like I expected, there is some advice here that is very applicable to me, and other things that are not so much. From a quick flip-through, I think there are some things later in the book that I will find very useful (and there's one that I've already started to try, in fact: emptying my bag when I come home every day). Like any self-help book, it's very "your mileage may vary", I think. I plan to make note of the things I find useful, and post about them later, after I've finished with it. One thing that does surprise me is that, the "discarding" part of her process should be done quickly - but she specifies that by "quickly" she means six months. That's a hell of a lot longer than I would have expected. I'm from a house where, every year, we had to declutter, deep-clean, and make the entire house immaculate, within the span of one month. Every single summer. I hated it! But, that's outside the scope of this journal entry, so. ;)

Reading next: I have a few books out from the library, will get to them once I'm finished the above. Titles are:
The Frangipani Tree Mystery - Ovidia Yu; mystery novel set in 1936 Singapore
Mouthful of Birds - Samanta Schweblin; short stories
Queen of Attolia - Megan Whalen Turner; this one is on order at the library, not in my hands yet.