There are some books that take me a long time to read because they deflect me onto other things. Reading Paz's 'The Labyrinth of Solitude' has got me interested in Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, on whom Paz was an authority, and I'm currently reading her works in the Penguin edition translated by Margeret Sayers Peden. Sor Juana was a sixteenth century Mexican nun - a most unlikely candidate for major poet, playwright, dazzling intellectual and proto-feminist, although she was all of these things. She turned her nun's cell into a sort of literary salon and amassed a huge library, and a collection of musical instruments and scientific equipment. Mexico, of course, didn't exist as such, but was part of New Spain, and in the grip of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Sor Juana's recantation of her intellectual activities signed in her own blood soon before she died seems almost too dramatic to be true, but it is true. In an ideal and leisure-rich world I'd tackle Paz's monumental biography and study of Sor Juana. In the meantime I need to finish 'The Labyrinth of Solitude', unless it sends me off to somewhere else...