Reading intentions, too early in the morning

I meant to read the last urban planning book club book, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility, and didn't, because I couldn't find a physical copy, don't like reading books on computers much, and found the introduction an off-putting combination of clunky writing and enthusiasm. I'm pleased to see cycling enthusiasm in the world! In hard copy I'd probably have read at least a few chapters! However. I've got the next book, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, out of the library and begun it. It seems promising.

I meant to begin reading something Classics-related before April started, and I did: I have been nibbling my way into the very large Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide. My Classics courses looked in detail at Greek religion and nodded at Roman religion and mentioned Egypt occasionally. This is being a very (variably) interesting broad survey of all the religions which were not those -- and those too, of course. I have so far found most useful the section on the flow of culture around the Mediterranean and the translation of gods and their names from one culture to another; and the section on the rise of the notion that history might have a plan to it and therefore an oncoming end; and the section on the religion of Egypt, which I knew very little about (well, even less than I do now).

Must take it back to the library soon, however, and I'm not a third of the way through.

And writing intention: the one novel I was going to keep soldiering on through no matter what got to 'actually, matter what' a couple of weeks ago, having been set as hard as stone for two weeks before that. Possibly I chose the wrong novel and it is actually as dead-ended as I think it is, possibly I chose a method that actually doesn't work for me and I should just keep nudging it over the next two years, possibly the protagonist is a complete non-entity and needs to be someone else, meaning that none of the existing twelve thousand words can be kept, and possibly I will reread what I've done on it on Wednesday and go, 'Oh. It's fine. As I was, then.' Or most likely some combination. But for this last while I've been enthusiastically writing something else totally different, and feeling it undergo satisfying moves forward and moments of "Aha! That was going to happen all along!" in just the way the other one wasn't.

...

It is almost four [edit: five] [edit: six, really? Why?] in the morning. I have not slept yet, and coincidentally nor has Charlotte. [edit: now she has, which is good, since she gets up to go to work in half an hour.] This is the only time I can remember when Charlotte has failed to sleep; it's comparatively pleasant to be insomniac in company, sharing tea, at least for a little while.

I saw Avengers: Endgame this evening. (Spoiler warning, I suppose). Staying through to the end of the credits caused me to miss the evening's last bus, so that was just over an hour's walk home, and during that walk I hit my shin very hard on the metal strut which used to hold up an advertisement on a defunct bus shelter, having taken notice of the matching bit on the far side of the shelter but for some reason not noticed that there were two of them. I swore a bit, and limped away thinking, 'Well, at least I can describe this as a substitute for my experience of watching Avengers: Endgame.'