The Nature of Things

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope My rating: 5 of 5 stars It was with a keen sense of anticipation that I turned to Trollope once again to read the second in his Barsetshire Chronicles series, Barchester Towers. I had read the first, The Warden, in 2013 and found it to be a wonderful reading experience; thus, the bar was set high. I was not disappointed. In Barchester Towers , we again meet the humble clergyman and thoroughly good man, now ex-warden, Mr. Harding, and his family. There is his most beloved daughter Eleanor Bold, now Widow Bold with a young son upon whom she shamelessly dotes. And there is the older daughter, Susan, and her husband, Archdeacon Grantly, and their children. All of these characters are integral to the story told here. But this book introduces new characters who will put their stamp upon Barsetshire and particularly Barchester. There is a new bishop in town. His name is Dr. Proudie and he is certainly one of the most indecisive men ever to hold such a...

One would think that reading a nineteenth century classic English novel would offer the reader sufficient escape from the headlines blasting our eyeballs in today's news. One would apparently be wrong. I am currently reading Barchester Towers , the Anthony Trollope novel first published in 1857. I'm reading the Penguin Books edition and I was happily getting into the story and learning the myriad characters when I hit page 51 of the book. There I met "Mr Quiverful, the rector of Puddingdale, whose wife still continued to present him from year to year with fresh pledges of her love, and so to increase his cares and, it is to be hoped, his happiness equally. Who can wonder that a gentleman, with fourteen living children and a bare income of 400 L. a year, should look after the loaves and fishes..." Quiverful? Quiver ful???  As in Quiver Full? Haven't I seen that in those screaming headlines recently? Oh, indeed I have! Yep, that's the philosophy espoused by the...

My rating: 5 of 5 stars Most of the reading I've been doing this summer has been of murder mysteries. Noir. Police procedurals. Thrillers. Cozy mysteries. But always with a murder involved. It was time for a cleansing of my reading palette. The writers of those mysteries all tailor their craft for the tastes of typical readers (if such animals exist) of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They feature short, pithy, undemanding sentences calculated to keep those pages turning and keep the reader from turning away to any of the other myriad of possible entertainments available to her. They write for a short-attention-span audience, and they are entertaining in their way. But now, for something completely different. Anthony Trollope's sentences can in no wise be described as short, pithy, or undemanding. Here is an example from early in the book, where Trollope is describing the warden's habit of playing on an imaginary violincello when he was under emotional stress. While...