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.

I, Claudius, pt. 3

Using Mucinex. Sick since Wednesday. On Thursday, as the temperature was climbing into the forties, Martin and I enjoyed an unexpected snow day. I slept all morning, on the couch.

Tomorrow it will be truly cold, and I expect to be Snowed In again.

Shoppers have been crowding the grocery stores, buying food for this snowstorm and for tonight’s Super Bowl parties. (Ah, yes, the Super Bowl. My policy is to boycott football, but I’ll watch this game.)

Edoarda wants to read I, Claudius — Stephen and I have persuaded her. Our enthusiasm for the book is undiminished, though we haven’t read much more of it. Last night I did get through two other chapters. There were a few more poisonings, and some suicides and banishments (for variety). But not everything was awful. There was a lovely account of little Claudius’s education (in particular, of his earliest forays into historiography). Claudius’s tutors were shrewdly described.

My first Kindle purchase, for my smartphone: Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete ($0.00). Let’s see how much I read of that book.