Covid day 4 - and back to Graham Greene

Happy to report that very sore throat has abated considerably.  Was still bad last evening, but after a few hours sleep I medicated at midnight with a couple of old cold and flu tablets I found lying on the bedside table, then started one of the dusty novels* near them, followed by a good sleep, and woke up with throat feeling much better.

Nose still not blocked, just annoying post nasal drip continuing, but I have had worse cases of that from a normal cold.  

Speaking of sleeping habits, this seems an enforced way of getting into a biphasic nighttime sleep pattern.  I currently don't mind it, too, and the midnight reading seemed pleasantly free of distraction.  But I still think it's an anti-social pattern, suitable mainly for hermits.

* Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory.  I was admiring again, in the first chapter, how good he is at scene setting, and wondering how authors get the knack for doing it well.  Because it seems to me quite a talent as to how to slip in details of the physical environment intermittently, at just the right level of detail, so as to not find it intrusive to narrative, but instead letting it build up the mind's picture in a gradual but convincing way.

I see that, as I would have expected, Greene did visit Mexico before writing the novel (and hated it), so  the physical details of locality are not all invented.  Science fiction writers have a harder time, I guess, since they first need to make up something to describe, and it's not as if they can look at anyone else's photos to help.