Finished up Nana which never does get much of a plot beyond the rise and (rather brief) fall of Nana. Most of the chapters are extended scenes (at the theater, two separate parties, a stay in the country, a day at a horse race, etc.) but then the penultimate chapter is a whirlwind of activity as everything falls apart for Nana's lovers. In the end she spends years out of the country and then when she returns to visit her abandoned son she catched small pox from him and dies, a bit reminiscent of Coralie in Lost Illusions. Overall I quite enjoyed it, Zola has a way with describing these scenes that is very engaging.
I got this box set of a collected Le Guin novellas and collection short stories and started in on some of the novellas. A few (like four of the Five Ways to Forgiveness and some others from the collected Hainish volumes) I've read, but amongst then I read Hernes a realist work that follows four generations of women from a small Oregon coastal town, narrating alternately in their own voices. It's a beautiful work, and turned out to be part of a collection Searoad based around the town, which I've also since read and really enjoyed (though the novella is definitely the highlight).
Watched The English on Amazon, a western miniseries. It was mostly nice to look at and well acted but suffered a lot from the writing trying too hard to make things suspenseful and surprising. The writers seemed to think the very interesting relationship between the two protagonists, a British woman seeking revenge for the death of her son and a Pawnee former US army scout, wasn't enough to hold the series. The first few episodes have these scenes in some town that have no obvious bearing on the rest of the narrative until you get a long flashback in episode 4 and most of the surprising revelations coming from the storyline are neither surprising nor particularly helped by having been made mysterious. That stands in contrast to a late story revelation about how the son died and why the mother says she is already dead that is both surprising and affecting. The story in the town and the flashback also involves the protagonists's ex-fiance who left Britain to raise cattle in the U.S. He's in the early scenes and the flashbacks doing not much at all (I think we are to maybe assume he is the father and the man she is after until the episode 4 flashback), then dies off screen and pointlessly in the file episode just before the protagonist arrives. If this were an old school tv series you'd almost think the writers had to write the actor out of the show for some non-diegetic reason. He's just gone and never really plays any part in the story, where it would have been interesting and dramatic to see them meet in the end. The finale also has the two protagonists be forced to separate with very little logic just apparently, so things can be more sad. Oh and the whole series suffers from the modern western cliche where almost literally every person the protagonists meet is trying to murder them.
