Hopeless romantic

That is me. I kind of like this about myself - I think it's endearing. (If you don't think so, please don't burst my bubble by telling me as much.)

Anyway, I've been reading more sporadically than usual (and catching up on Stanford magazine, actually) but after several nights in a row where something kept me from the final 40 pages of The Painted Veil (by W. Somerset Maugham), I am through it.

This is the July book club selection, and is a particularly exciting choice because there will also be pizza and movie during the meeting. (Hooray!) I don't like to blog about books before the meeting, b/c then I am over all my "interesting" thoughts. But then I don't like to blog after, b/c by then I'm ready to move on. (This is clearly a dilemma. If you have solutions, let me know. Perhaps I could live-blog the meeting? Because that clearly wouldn't be annoying.)

I really liked this book. I could just start and end there; it was thought-provoking and human and obnoxious and unsatisfying and thus terribly satisfying. I was often distracted thinking about the film adaptation and wondering what they would change and whom they cast, etc. And I also found myself drawing analogies to Gone with the Wind, which I think was first published a decade later than this.

Instead of getting into all of those things, I'll just leave you with this early passage:

He did not speak because he had nothing to say. But if nobody spoke unless he had something to say, Kitty reflected, with a smile, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.