Day Fifty-Five
Persuasion by Jane Austen Page: 180
So I said in yesterday’s post that I had finished The Divine Comedy and when I wrote and posted it I was within 20 pages but instead of actually finishing those pages like I intended, I stood in the kitchen and chatted with Gabe and Amanda. Bad llama. Normally I count only the pages I’ve actually read by the time I do my blog post and any pages read after that count for the next day. That makes it much easier to keep track and it keeps me honest. But for some reason I really wanted to be done with Dante and so I lied. It’s not that I haven’t been enjoying the book, I have very much, it’s just that I felt like I’d been taking too long to finish it I guess. I’ve actually enjoyed almost every word of it and I can see myself picking it up again and again in coming years. Dante evokes such powerful images of both peace and torment, his philosophy deserves thoughtful consideration, and his theology is so far from contemporary feel-good, name-it and claim-it garbage that I want to linger over his words. Anyway, The Divine Comedy now joins The Confessions of St Augustine and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson as future re-reads.
I’ve been reading Persuasion most of the afternoon and find it just as enjoyable as ever. I don’t really have a favorite Austen novel, they are all so perfect but I do have something to complain of in Everyman’s edition of Persuasion. It actually has several typos in it including several that make the sense of a sentence hard to get at. Still the novel is quite pleasant and I almost burst out laughing (in the middle of our crowded coffee shop) when Sir Walter described another man as “shockingly underhung”. I’ve no idea what he meant by it but I know what I think of!
I’ve been quite surprised to find myself reading only one or two books at a time. Normally I’m into three, four, maybe ten and enjoying everyone. I think the necessity of typing out the titles of the books I was reading that day and calculating the page numbers has constrained me to limit myself. It might actually be good for me…I’m not sure.