Future reading thoughts

I'm drawing (slowly, but steadily) to the end of "Bleak House."

This is actually my third attempt to read it; both previous times I got distracted or bored and put it aside, and then had to go start from the beginning. But now I'm at the interesting part, where all the threads of the story get woven together, and I CARE again, and want to see what happens.

And a couple of not-too-spoilerish comments:

Just as Dickens can write characters I really detest (Mr. Skimpole, and oh, how I'd like to kick him in the shins), he can also write wonderful characters that I love.

I really love Mrs. Bagnet. Actually, I love the whole family - her - the "old girl" with her serviceable gray cloak and capacious umbrella, her good husband Mat (also known as "Lignum Vitae"), and their three children (Woolwich, Malta, and Quebec - all named for where the family was (Mat being in the Army) when they were born).

Mrs. Bagnet is just a plain good person. She did something that made me happy and made me very relieved on behalf of another character.

And Mr. George. I'm grateful to learn he didn't do something I was afraid he had done, but that seemed out of character for him.

And I want to find out if Esther finally gets the happiness she's been promised. She deserves it, even if she doesn't think so.

But now I need to think about what novel to read next. (A nice dilemma to have). I do want to read more of Austen (I confess, with some embarrassment, that "Pride and Prejudice" is the only one I've actually read, even if I more or less know the plot of "Emma" and of "Sense and Sensibility"). But, my copy of Austen's works is a large "Everyman's Library" composed of all six of her major works* - not exactly portable, and with Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks coming up, I need easily portable books. (I cannot read fast enough to be sure I could finish an Austen between Thanksgiving and Christmas break, so I think  I'll wait until January to start them).

I do have a copy of "His Majesty's Dragon" - a historical fantasy novel (The Napoleonic wars, except with a sort of "air force" composed of dragons and dragonriders). Again, this is one I've started and put down a couple time, mainly because I find a small part of my brain yelling at me to read something more edifying. (I try really hard not to be a book-snob, but there is a small part of my brain that IS.) But it's the type of book that seems like it would be good vacation reading to me - big, sweeping story, fun, AND it's a smallish paperback that would be fairly portable on the train.

I also have a few Edwardian to midcentury British novels - "One Pair of Hands" and "A Provincial Lady" (both purchased after reading Jane Brocket's reviews of them and thinking they sounded fun). So those are also possibilities. (I also have a copy of the novel version of "Mrs Miniver," which is supposed to be somewhat different from the movie (Perhaps, it being a British book, I should use the British usage and say "different TO") which I bought because I wanted to see how it compared).

I do also want to read "The Three Musketeers" sometime and I found what purports to be a good (and fairly unexpurgated!) translation, but again, it's a giant hardback production, so not so good for lugging on the train. 

And I have stacks and stacks of Trollope novels. I could take along a Trollope novel; it's been too long since I read any Anthony Trollope.

And oh, I am sure there are many others I am forgetting. I am bad in bookstores, just as I am bad in yarn shops or craft stores in general: I see things I want, I imagine I will have time to enjoy it, and so I buy it. But it's probably not such a bad thing to have stacks and stacks of books ahead and to have the luxury of picking just the one you want to read next.

(*More on my big Austen tome: it was one of the books I bought - perhaps for as little as fifty cents, I think that's what hardbacks ran back in those days - at the Hudson Library used-book sale. They used to have an ongoing (every Saturday, I think) used-book sale and I used to shop there a lot. I still have many books in my collection that came from there, even though I moved away for college in 1987 and my parents moved away in 1989. But it was so much fun to go there - Hudson did not, as I remember, have a used-book store in those days (or if they did, it was a snooty antiquarian place I'd have been afraid to have gone in, whereas the library sale was friendly and happy). And the money went to support the library. And people would drop off all KINDS of books - I got some really nice Modern Library or Everyman's Library editions of classics, which, while a serious book collector might sneer at them as "reading copies" - well, "reading copies" was what I wanted, as a broke high-school student. They also had some foreign language books and I bought a few books in French from them. And they had records. And part of the fun was just the sense of you never knew what they might have when you walked in the door. I guess people in Hudson were generous when they got rid of books, and that people in Hudson had a LOT of books.)