I've developed a lovely evening ritual.

Before falling asleep, I read

• a Billy Collins poem (I'm reading through my six Billy Collins books, in order)
• another poem or two (currently from the Garrison Keillor Good Poems anthology; I'm not a huge Keillor fan, but I like this collection)
• a short piece of prose (right now, that's a chapter from The Flight of the Iguana, which I am really enjoying)

I am a huge Tom Stoppard fan. I can't wait for the day I get to see all three parts of Coast of Utopia. (I have the published plays - they're wonderful.) I've seen Arcadia four times. I love re-reading his work.

So I was really looking forward to Ira Nadel's Tom Stoppard: A Life.

A luscious napoleon from the fabulous French bakery led me on a click-fest through Wikipedia. Reading about mille-feuille pastries, I saw a link to the Galaktoboureko pastry. My mind on the mille in mille-feuille, I wondered whether the "galac" part of galactoboureko might mean "many" or "million", something like the "mille" in my Napoleon.

So off I went to the OED to get a good grasp of the etymology.

One thing led to another this evening, and before I knew it, I was listening to the Partridge Family's "I Think I Love You." This, in turn, led to a web search for info on two of the men behind the Partridge Family's music, Wes Farrell and Tony Romeo. Romeo wrote a hit for the Cowsills before writing several songs for the Partridge Family, including "Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque."

He died in 1995. I'm amazed, and a little dismayed, that I can't find more info about him on the web.

I finished chapter 5 (of 7) in this self-paced programmed music theory book. A lot of it is review of things I learned in piano lessons; I've been really happy to discover that I remember the major scales as well as I do. I did learn the functional names of the various chords: tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading, and then back to tonic.

I have another programmed music course when I'm finished with this one. I'd like to supplement these things with Practica Musica exercises.

This was a fast read.

Somehow the marketing - probably more for the movie than the book - led me to expect something funnier. The official Amazon review gets it right - "harrowing" is more like it. There were certainly some funny moments, and some wonderful turns of phrase, and I really liked the portrayal of the author, with his love of all things shiny. I suppose I can forgive the marketers - if I hadn't thought "funny", I might not have picked it up (after all, don't I have enough depressing stuff to read?), but that definitely isn't my overall impression of the book.

I have this sudden urge to go to MIT.

Stopped by a garage sale yesterday and saw a few books stacked on the sidewalk. The nice young lady said they were two for a dollar - a fine price - so I started digging through them in earnest.

I came away with:

Running with Scissors
My Antonia
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Tom Jones
The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners (Rosenberg)
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Michael Chabon)

A little while back, I read about The Last Unicorn on Neil Gaiman's blog (he mentions the special edition of the DVD but there are lots of earlier references to Peter Beagle in there).

It sounded like something I should check out, so I reserved a whole bunch of Peter Beagle books from the library. (I love being able to reserve books at the library and waltz in to pick them up a few days later.)

This evening I found the International Music Score Library Project. I was looking for info on the themes in Bach's cello suites, read the Wikipedia page on the Cello Suites, and clicked the link on over to the IMSLP.

I am so thrilled by the resources available on the web. I'm just beginning to learn about Bach's music, and having the scores handy is such a gift.