Let's see if this works...

Testing the posting-by email function here. My apologies if this shows up
in 700-pt font in an eyestabbing shade of pink.

I've been making out like a bandit as Ben and Melissa prepare to move to
New York. The other night while we watched the extended Two
Towers I went through their unsold inventory for half.com and came
away with quite a nice selection of books, including Margery Kemp, the
Sarah Waters book I haven't yet read (Affinity), a cookbook, and
a marvelous book of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. The Interpreter
of Maladies. I've been burning through the Lahiri - she writes the
sort of stories I like best, stories where the problems are problems of
feeling rather than doing. My most significant criticism is that in a few
of her stories the children characters don't work. In one story the child
is a bloodless viewpoint character who feels more like a device for
observing the collapse of the main character than an actual human, and in
another the child has the common flaw of seeming much too young for his
stated age. I think it's probably difficult to write a convincing child
unless you have a child of similar age on hand as a template.