Books that take place in a single day

By coincidence, the two book groups I'm in are both reading books that take place in the course of a single day. The first one is the classic Ulysses by James Joyce. The second is Saturday by Ian McEwan.
Can you think of any other novels that take place in the course of a single day? Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is a famous one I just thought of. Any others?

Spring and the color Green

My poem-a-day calendar produced a Robert Frost work last week, "Nothing Gold Can Stay."
It's quite impressive and short, read it here. (Sorry for the link, I suspect it's still under copyright.)
Right now in Florida, everything has transformed from winter gold to spring green. It makes me think how indomitable the color green is.
It reminds me that one of my favorite David Foster Wallace short stories is "Everything is Green" in the collection Girl with Curious Hair. That story is also short -- two pages. (Can't find the text for it online, sorry about that. Check out the book from your local library.)

March 10th Spoon River

I have a calendar that features a poem or poetry-related information for every day of the year. March 10th (Happy B-day, DJ!) featured a poem from my beloved Spoon River Anthology. Here it is:

Hortense Robbins

MY name used to be in the papers daily
As having dined somewhere,
Or traveled somewhere,
Or rented a house in Paris,
Where I entertained the nobility.
I was forever eating or traveling,
Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.
Now I am here to do honor
To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.
No one cares now where I dined,
Or lived, or whom I entertained,
Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden!

That poem is OK, it's frequently quoted, but it's not one of my favorites. I would have chosen this one for the calendar. (FYI, a milliner is a hatmaker):

Mrs. Williams

I WAS the milliner
Talked about, lied about,
Mother of Dora,
Whose strange disappearance
Was charged to her rearing.
My eye quick to beauty
Saw much beside ribbons
And buckles and feathers
And leghorns and felts,
To set off sweet faces,
And dark hair and gold.
One thing I will tell you
And one I will ask:
The stealers of husbands
Wear powder and trinkets,
And fashionable hats.
Wives, wear them yourselves.
Hats may make divorces—
They also prevent them.
Well now, let me ask you:
If all of the children, born here in Spoon River
Had been reared by the County, somewhere on a farm;
And the fathers and mothers had been given their freedom
To live and enjoy, change mates if they wished,
Do you think that Spoon River
Had been any the worse?

One day I might write a critical essay on Mrs. Williams, comparing her with my other favorite Spoon River entry, Lucinda Matlock. There's a lot there:

Lucinda Matlock

I WENT to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed—
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you—
It takes life to love Life.

Domestic memoir for the alternative set

I just finished reading two books by Dan Savage: The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant and The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family. These memoirs are about Savage and his boyfriend adopting an infant son and then deciding whether or not they should get married (even though it would not be a legal marriage in the United States). These books were quick reads and pretty interesting. Savage is smart and political and makes compelling arguments in favor (and, in some moments, against) gay adoption and marriage. Savage is also the author of a syndicated sex column called "Savage Love." It's sometimes funny, and sometimes poignant, and sometimes really gross. But it's definitely never for the easily offended. You have been warned; read it here. Savage is a sex radical but interestingly he's also a very traditional family man, and he is not unaware of the irony. His boyfriend stays home to raise the baby while Savage is the breadwinner.
Another nonconformist domestic memoir recently published is Marion Winik's Above Us Only Sky, the title a reference to her own atheism. Winik wrote a fascinating memoir called First Comes Love, about her relationship with her gay, HIV-positive husband. She had two children with him -- amazingly, she did not contract the virus herself. He died and she raised the children on her own, chronicling those years in another book, The Lunch Box Chronicles. In the new book, she has fallen in love again and left Austin, Texas (possibly the coolest city in America) for rural Pennsylvania with her new husband and a new baby daughter. I'm looking forward to reading it; I'll post a review here when I do.

Oscar books

At last night's Academy Awards, Best Adapted Screenplay award winner Larry McMurtry gave a shout-out to book culture during his acceptance speech:

And finally I'm going to thank all the booksellers of the world. Remember, "Brokeback Mountain" was a book before it was a movie. From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world, all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book -- a wonderful culture, which we mustn't lose.

McMurtry is probably most famous for being the author of novels such as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show (which also became movies).
A point of clarification: "Brokeback Mountain" began its artistic life as a short story by Annie Proulx. It's part of her collection, Close Range: Wyoming Stories.