What I'm reading -- among other things. The occasion is a new book by David Crane: The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons, which is plunging me back into the heady waters of Romanticism. The week has been largely devoted to absorbing as much of Byron's poetry -- and his rather complicated promiscuity -- as possible, as the Crane book keeps losing me. But it's an intriguing work nonetheless; fly-on-the-wall imaginative history, you might call it, as Crane takes the rather daring course of creating (based on the agreed-upon facts) of what must have been said in the last bitter meeting between Byron's ill-matched wife, Annabella, and the half-sister, Augusta, whom he couldn't stop screwing. It's so hard to pull off these refresher courses on towering giants, though. So much to know.