Friday was pretty hectic. The kids had pretty much reached their limit and came in to school loud and boisterous. Teachers were tired, and we were all just looking forward to a good week off.
So here I am, inaugurating the week at 5:30 am, in the dark and quiet, with a fancy coffee I made with whipped cream and cinnamon.
I'd mentioned a few days ago about the Classics Club, an online reading club that blogs about what classics we are reading. Every once in a while the Club moderator puts forth a 'game' called Classics Spin. You list 20 classic books you always wanted to read but haven't yet. Maybe they were too intimidating, or to long, or too intellectually demanding, or you just have put it off and now it's 10 years later and you still haven't read that book you always wanted to. . So you make a list of 20 and number them. The Club 'spins' an imaginary wheel and lands on a number. They publish the number. You read the book you listed at that number by December 31 and post whether you met the challenge or not. It's very casual and lots of fun.
The number yesterday was 4 and that was Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon published in 1862. It was Braddon's most successful and well-known novel. Critic John Sutherland (1989) described the work as "the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels". The plot centres on "accidental bigamy" which was in literary fashion in the early 1860s. Thanks, Wikipedia, for the summary.
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| Cover of an edition of Lady Audley's Secret pre-1900. |
For now I'm sitting in the pre-dawn, listening to Pandora Christmas Hymns, sipping my sweet and hot coffee, hearing the coffee pot tick, the gas hiss, and cats snore, and all's well on the first moments of Thanksgiving break.
2 comments:
Hi Elizabeth,
Look forward to all your Quiet Life posts , and love this one especially. Will check my local library to see if I can get this book.
Laura
Hi Laura,
Thanks so much for reading! I hadn't heard of this book, the author, or the genre until I'd read The Classics Club's suggested list of books. I chose most of my books from their list plus a few of my own I either already have or want to read that were not on their list. I plan to start Lady Audley tonight after church. I finished James Scott Bell's book Blind Justice last night.
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