Reading Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd having avoided it for a variety of silly reasons. Tess I'd had to read (& teach) Jude, too. This one, however, had slipped by.

Perhaps it's the R F Langley Journals acting as a lens but so many passages come into focus - on the constellations, flowers, the landscape, interiors of a house or barn ... Perhaps, too, it's a function of middle age - attention caught not so much by the rather too contrived romantic plots but all the other 'stuff' that Hardy includes. I find I'm even enjoying the heavy-handed philosophising or a phrase such as "his square-framed perpendicularity" which verges on the comical. It's a writing which has different grains to it. Satisfying in its textures - rough as often are.

It's interesting, too, to realise how time frittered in skimming websites on the iPad can be used to greater effect & reward absorbed in the pages of a novel.

It feels good to get back into the habit of dwelling in the page.