Nigel and I just now returned from shopping. We purchased rather more than we set out to, an occurrence that is rare with us. Having found the item Dad requested for his upcoming birthday/anniversary, I proceeded to buy the Essential Bach CD with 36 of his greatest compositions; Mission Impossible and Mission Impossible II on DVD, which were on special at K-Mart; two shirts and the Penguin edition of The Three Musketeers.
I finished reading the Discworld book Wyrd Sisters on Thursday. It’s been my favourite Discworld book so far. It is really a set of parodies on various parts of Macbeth. Even the title itself, Wyrd Sisters, is taken straight from the play: Saw you the weird sisters?
says Macbeth to Lennox towards the end. But mainly, this Discworld book made me laugh a lot more than the others. The Fool was an especially funny character, but not in the way you might imagine, and the "Bubble bubble, Toil and trouble" bit (again a parody of a scene from Macbeth) had me in stitches.
I’m now reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and enjoying it thoroughly, if enjoying is the right word for a story of such tragedy. I’m really zipping through it, finding it hard to put down even at 2am in the morning! I’m sixty odd pages through the novel proper, but there were another sixty-eight pages of introduction and history written by various scholars of English literature. The history of the book was itself an interesting read. It’s amazing Hardy was able to produce a comprehensible book at all, considering the way in which he was forced to apply self-censorship to various passages, which led to him having to alter other passages so they remained consistent. The Penguin edition, which is the one I’m reading, presents as authentic a version as possible. But as the history of the novel explains, through a complex set of circumstances, it is impossible to call any version of Tess original. There simply never was an original. If I keep up my current pace of reading, I shall have completed Tess by week’s end.
