Book Ten - Bleak House - Part Four + The Infidelity

I am a serial reader. When I read a book I am faithful to that book until it is over. Others like to read two or three books simultaneously, but I find that I can't fully appreciate any book unless I give it my full attention. Imagine my chagrin as I confess that I cheated on Bleak House. My copy of The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society arrived and I wanted to read it more than I wanted to read Dickens.

Before judging me too harshly, imagine this scenario: you've already read a book, loved it, and this book has returned to you. It's a great book. There were many things you loved about this book when it first entered your life. This book has wit, compassion, history, and the setting is just the right age for you. When you meet a book like that you just naturally want to reread it to learn everything you can about it. It says so right on page 11 --

Lamb also taught Hunt's youngest daughter to say the Lord's Prayer backward. You naturally want to learn everything you can about a man like that.

I couldn't help it. It just happened. I didn't plan it. Any of those believable? I thought not. Fine then, I cheated because I wanted to! However, I have repented of my betrayal and vow that I will not read another word of Guernsey until I finish Bleak House. I would apologize to Mr. Dickens but as a famous author, he's probably accustomed to this sort of thing. Plus he's like, dead and stuff.

Book Ten - Bleak House - Part Two

More wonderful quotes from Mr. Comedy, Charles Dickens--

Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost.  She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

I believe the Lib Dems are trying to reverse that policy.

"Pray take some refreshment, sir," said I.

I so want to use that line at least once in my lifetime. 

More great descriptions--

Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so inexhaustible a subject.

There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she is in an ill humour and near knives.

Finally, we’re getting to the mystery! I do love a mystery. 

But whether each evermore watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know how much the other knows—all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts.

*cue suspenseful music*