The weather outside is chilly and crisp, with a bright blue sky overhead and gold-and-red leaves crunching underfoot. It's my favorite kind of autumn day. Walking down the block and back with Maya takes almost ten minutes because she has to stop to sniff every pile of leaves we pass, and we pass a lot of them! It doesn't feel like November, but I love it.

It's the perfect weather for reading the book that just arrived from Amazon, Sarah Monette's The Bone Key (the Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth). This book is dedicated to M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft, and it is just enormously fun - a luscious tribute to all those turn-of-the-century ghost writers. (I've never read any M.R. James, but I do love Edith Wharton's ghost stories, and these remind me of hers in a wonderful way - but with a distinctively 21st-century edge.) I very, very rarely buy collections of short stories, but I'm just adoring this one. I started reading it this morning, and I've been just racing through the stories, curled up on the futon facing the window, with Maya sleeping beside me and the golden leaves of the tree outside seeming to glow in the sunlight. After I finish the collection, I think I'll go back and re-read each piece more slowly, to really savor the writing, but right now the stories themselves are just too fun to slow down. I want to know what happens! I love Sarah Monette's fantasy novels, but for sheer fun, it's impossible to beat curling up with a collection of wonderfully spooky ghost stories on a beautiful autumn day.