Did you ever have to do that thing at school, in biology, where you went down to some previously overlooked dribble of water just beyond out-of-bounds to scoop up a sample of pond into tiny glass beacons whose contents soon revealed themselves to be complex, alive and varied, often pathogenic (Faecal coliform *snicker*)? I raise this memory because it offers a good, overwrought metaphor for what a scoop of my reading brain would give up these days, vestibule that it is for the various interconnected ponds of reading that I must wade into for my writing, my book editing, my pleasure, sometimes my folly. Under the microscope, my grey matter for this past month reveals: