Day Two Hundred and Forty One
Emma Page: 495 Finished
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh Page: 225
I find it interesting the way fiction can make you examine your own life. A Handful of Dust deals with a happy marriage that is unexpectedly destroyed through adultery and carelessness. The principal couple’s child also dies. Of course while reading it all I wanted to do was go hug my boys and find my husband and kiss him. But I think that the truly fascinating thing is the way that little details, minute descriptions of comments and conversations can make you think about the way you’re treating other people. In Emma it was the selfishness of Mrs. Elton toward her husband that reminded me to be extra careful of how I speak to and of my husband when we are in company. And in A Handful of Dust the thoughtless way Brenda simply allows herself to fall for another man without any self-examination, in fact with a sense of fatalism, reminds me to always be standing guard over my marriage. Little things, even asides, in a novel can really hit home if the timing is right for the reader to really hear them.
Waugh’s novel almost made me cry, but the final chapter (which was originally a short story called “The man who loved Dickens) makes me ill. The tragedy is so very palpable as one reads the pages. I’ve read that chapter, in its short story version, three times now and feel a little more sick each time.
I managed what I think is an impressive 270 pages today even while being very productive in the chores department. I read on a walk to the grocery store for formula and managed over fifty pages before 9am! And the boys both took two hour naps…at the same time! If this continues to work for me, I might have figured out a sure way to get my remaining 80 books read in the next four months