The project continues apace

I'm just coming to the end of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. For all that I (sincerely) extol the virtues of classic literature, this is the kind of book I dread a little when I begin it. When I started writing here, lo these many years ago, I talked quite a bit about David Copperfield, which I wound up really enjoying, but that kind of lengthy, meandering, Dickensian work still makes me a little uneasy as I see it looming on my TBR list. I don't think it's actually the thought that I won't enjoy it. I think it's the rest of that TBR list. I think it's the knowledge that it will take me some time to get through that book, no matter how enjoyable I find it, and during that time, the rest of those books will be staring me in the face.

This is, for me, particularly true in the summer. This is largely my own fault - I start the summer with a (long) list of books I want to read and, though I don't reasonably expect to get to the end, it is my goal to get as close as possible. This summer, that list is somewhere around 50 books, about a third of which are part of that reading-my-shelves project (like The Woman in White) and tend to be lengthy classics (Collins is the last of my C authors, which means Defoe, Dickens, and Dostoevsky await).

Anyway, maybe this is good for me. For all that I've loved reading a metric ton of YA and middle grade stuff over the last 5 or 6 years, it might be a good idea to be forced to slow down a bit and revisit that other side of myself as a literary consumer. Not to mention, those books tend to wind up being pretty great. The Woman in White has been pretty great. It is suspenseful and thrilling and often quite funny, and it's two of my favorite funny lines that I'd like to close this with:

On Mrs. Vesey and vegetables:

"Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all."

And this, which I think I'd like to include in some variation on any invitation I send from this point forward:

"My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody."