Admin Notes

I sort of feverishly added a bunch of people to my reading list, but have nothing as yet in terms of reciprocal reading material to recommend me in return, so I won't feel hurt and puzzled if no one adds me back.

It seems I also added cross-posting to LJ last year when I set up, but entirely failed to begin using, this journal. I am good, it seems, at getting ready to do something sometime in the future. And here we are in the future. How disappointing for everyone.

This was one of those days I suspected I wouldn't get anything done, and I mostly didn't, so I'm thinking about a books post, which always feels vaguely purposeful.

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Books Post - Trollope & Barchester Towers

I am in a classics reading group, which during 2016 I mostly failed to show up for, excepting January's David Copperfield (1850) and December's The Warden (1855).

You might therefore assume I give special precedence to British books written during the 1850s, though I do not know that to be the case.

The only Trollope I had ever read before was Barchester Towers (1857), in second or third year uni. It is, of course, the sequel to The Warden, but I'd never read that. I don't know why.

Reading choices in early university seem in retrospect both more random and more joyful. I read a book on Provencal poetry, for example, and acquired a permanent affection for Langue d'oc, though I followed up on that in no way. Maybe my reading the book had something to do with Pound? I don't think so, though. I hadn't heard of a lot of big names at seventeen through nineteen, though I wanted to think I was literary.

All I remembered about Barchester Towers until this re-read, so many years later, was Eleanor's shrinking widow's cap and her stomping her "little foot" at one point, which had startled me at the time, as until then I had been assuming she was a fully developed female character.

( Further Thoughts on Barchester Towers )

Enough of Trollope for now, I think. I've a drawing date with a friend down the road. This three-week cold has left me short of puff, but I should just about be able to make it a block and a half.

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