Finished Confessions of an ugly Step-Sister last night, picked up the League of frightened Men (Rex Stout, 1935) this morning at the library, having reserved it. What I like about Gregory Maguire and Rex Stout, essentially, is their (very different but equally perfect) prose-styles and worldviews, the one (for want of a better word) Neo-Baroque and gay, the other Modernist-Lapidary and straight (even a tad homophobic). I guess that makes me Catholic. Odd how I keep dallying in one sense or another with the Whore of Rome. Like I've said several times to Marianne, herself infant-baptized in the One Holy Apostolic Church, I find myself being included in amongst all the mummery and hocus-pocus; somehow feeling loved and accepted, in a way I never am among Protestants, who certainly are much closer to my cultural roots. It has to do somehow with Roman Catholicism's never-minding my abiding contempt for and hatred of St. Paul (one of the twin pillars, for Christ's sake, of Christianity). Somehow, the fact that I do, purely and simply, love the man who preached the Sermon on the Mount, without worshipping him, seems not at all to scandalize my RC brethren, while Baptists and Free Methodists tend to get apoplectic with me--and I with them. I ought to ask my shamaan and my psychiatrist about it.