I'm still plugging along on Barchester Towers. The truth is, I'm getting a little tired of reading this book; it feels like it's taking forever! I'm getting anxious to be done with it so I can move on to something new. The book is still good; I'm just getting bored of reading it.
The vocabulary word for today is "bairn" which is a Scottish word (Trollope uses it when he's quote Robert Burns at one point) meaning a child. I love the way Scottish words sound and this one sort of rolls off my tongue.
I have a couple of light-hearted quotes for you today. One thing I like about this book is how often Trollope inserts funny little things into serious situations. First of all, our dear Mr. Arabin is pining for the love of the young widow Mrs. Bold:
"Then he made up his mind not to think of her any more, and went on thinking of her till he was almost in a state to drown himself in the little brook which ran at the bottom of the archdeacon's grounds."
And here in the second quote, old Miss Thorne is throwing a party, about which she is very concerned with every detail, and she is going over last minute preparations with one of her servants: Mr. Plomacy.
"'But,' said she in a dolorous voice, all but overcome by her cares, 'it was specially signified that there were to be sports.' 'And so there will be, of course,' said Mr. Plomacy. 'They'll all be sporting with the young ladies in the laurel walks. Them's the sports they care most about now-a-days."
That happens to me, too. Sometimes, I just want to give up on a book, but it just goes against my grain. What I will occasionally do is start reading something else, maybe even something a little "lighter", then go back and finish the other one. I usually start at the beginning of the chapter that I put down.
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