Not totally futile

[flemmings]

Went out to shovel wet snow this morning and then stayed in, so today was a de facto Spend No Money day.

Made roast cauliflower and mustard sauce yesterday: delicious and indigestible. More mustard, less oil, must try with other veg.

Someone is collecting books for a (presumed) literacy project. Will take anything and will pick up, so three boxes are now sitting on my porch.

To which end I flipped or skimmed a couple of things this afternoon- the very twee Chronicles of Avonlea, a Tanith Lee YA, a Ruth Rendell by any other name depressing psychological thriller- all of which are now happily sitting in boxes in the cold. My habit of picking things up off front lawns and Wee Frees that I might want to read some day has yielded to time's winged chariot. Life is now too short for Don Quixote and A Tale of Two Cities, but not for Dick Francis and Stephen Brust.

Lord but I miss having a keyboard.

Comments

[heliopausa]

Are you typing on a phone? I hope you get a keyboard again soon.

"very twee" - I guess L.M. Montgomery was pretty cynical - she knew exactly the sort of stories that would sell, and could churn them out at will; at least those two "Avonlea" short story collections read that way.
Don Quixote is sitting unread on my bedroom floor right this very minute, partly because it's so long. I liked Tale of Two Cities though, or of not exactly liked, was utterly gripped by it - Dickens at absolutely breakneck speed, almost wild with the horrors of it all.

[flemmings]

No, luckily, I have a tablet that's not quite as tiny as the phone. But the phone has predictive spelling and the tablet doesn't, which is a pain.

Oh, so The Road to Yesterday is more of same? Into the Little Library it goes. It's amazing how out of sorts the Chronicles left me.

Dickens can be compulsively readable, but that was my feeling 40 years ago when, I can only conclude, I was a much more patient person. Who hadn't been ruined by the internet.

[heliopausa]

I can't speak to The Road to Yesterday - I meant Further Chronicles of Avonlea - which, to be fair, does push the envelope a bit. There's a nearly-ghost story, and an indigenous heroine (written as the outsider, though, and not set on PEI), and a mildly funny one, along with the usual serves of sentiment, and an awful Daddy-long-legs style one about educating the orphan and then marrying her. (There was some French philosopher who started all that, wasn't there? A literary fad that's just about over and done, thank goodness.)

[flemmings]

Rousseau, I think- La Nouvelle Heloise, as if the old one wasn't bad enough. These days everyone goes yuck at the idea, though of course it had a good run.

Luckily the Further Chronicles wasn't one I picked up off the curbside.