Easy to Put Down

A weighty tome

Months of sheltering in place have yielded numerous benefits (to those who can handle the economic pain of not working), among which are cracking open books that one never could find the time for.

Apparently, reading War and Peace is now a thing:

Americans have been so desperate for diversion they are reaching for fat literary works that taunted them from their bookshelves for years—the same ones many have falsely claimed at dinner parties to have read...

Tolstoy’s plot traces the upended lives of the Rostov and Bolksonsky families, weaving in and out of the aristocratic salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg before moving on to the battlefield. Pages dwell on gambling, carousing, dueling and love scenes, while an unanticipated disaster (in this case Napoleon) approaches.

After Hawaii, my 2nd Michener book

Long before the distractions of the internet and 500-channel television, your humble blogger went through a James Michener phase. 800+-page tomes like Hawaii, Iberia, Chesapeake, the Source, and Centennial did require setting aside at least a couple of weeks apiece but I did manage to finish all of them.

(In order to impress you, dear reader, I could attribute such dedication to a thirst for knowledge, but that would be wrong. Pronounced introversion plus an almost OCD-like compulsion to finish every book were stronger reasons.)

It's a sign of how much my reading has deteriorated that I'm having a great deal of trouble completing Pride and Prejudice, which clocks in at a mere 272 pages.

There really should not be any difficulty because Jane Austen's writing is not abstruse, plus I have the motivation finally to learn to recognize the Austen references that pervade our culture; at least once a week a Hallmark movie has a character named "Darcy" who falls in love with "Elizabeth".

(In my defense I find English manners in the 19th century to be stupefying, when women can only meet the male object of their desire by being properly introduced through a mutual acquaintance, they spend chapters discussing how they can manipulate the mutual acquaintance, woman and man have the meeting where a few words are spoken, then the women discuss for chapters what the words meant. Arrggh.)

I'd better finish Pride in the coming week, because if the lockdown ends I won't. I did enjoy one movie version, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, where the Bennet sisters, bosoms heaving, defend themselves against the undead with martial arts and swordplay. If only Jane Austen had written about George Wickham dining on brains, it would have been a faster read...