Pepys, pt. 2

No longer feeling sick, but still coughing up phlegm.

My Kindle ed. of Pepys’s Diary is unwieldy. Footnotes interrupt the text (and then go on for pages). Thus I’m retreating to The Shorter Pepys — 1025 pp. of continuous, but heavily abridged, diarying. My initial plan was to read one entry per day, reaching the Diary’s end in one decade (more or less). I’d also keep a diary of my reading of Pepys’s Diary. I’d publish that diary on this blog.

Last night, though, as I lay in bed, I briskly read five or six diary entries because they were so absorbing and concise. Pepys eats hearty meals. He hears pedantic sermons. For hours and hours, he plays card games.

Entertaining though this is, I don’t think I’ll be describing much of it.