Finished: The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy). Good book! :-) I really liked the writing and the story was intricate with some twists and turns. Loved two of the characters, the "Scotchman", Donald Farfrae, and the daughter, Elizabeth-Jane. I had so many emotions about the "mayor" Michael Henchard....loathing, disgust, confusion...and later, pity, and even a squeak of compassion. I think for me to go from loathing to compassion is the sign of a good story all around. Especially when that story starts off with a 21 year old man getting drunk and selling his wife and baby daughter to another man. The story grabbed me there and didn't let go until I was satisfied with the end. And finally, a story where the good, true-hearted people prevailed...even if it took them some bumps in the road to get there.

A few representatives of the writing:

"The chief--almost the only--attraction of the young woman's face was its mobility. When she looked down sideways to the girl she became pretty, and even handsome, particularly that in the action her features caught slantwise the rays of the strongly coloured sun, which made transparencies of her eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips. When she plodded on in the shade of the hedge, silently thinking, she had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps fair play. The first phase was the work of Nature, the second probably of civilization."

"The sloping pathways by which spectators had ascended to their seats were pathways yet. But the whole was grown over with grass, which now, at the end of summer was bearded with withered bents that formed waves under the brush of the wind, returning to the attentive ear of Aeolian modulations, and detaining for moments the flying globes of thistle-down."

"Time, 'in his own grey style,' taught Farfrae how to estimate his experience of Lucetta--all that it was, and all that it was not. There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity--even the reverse, indeed; and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete. But Farfrae was not of those. It was inevitable that the insight, briskness, and rapidity of his nature should take him out of the dead blank which his loss threw about him. He could not but perceive that by the death of Lucetta he had exchanged a looming misery for a simple sorrow. After the revelation of her history, which must have come sooner or later in any circumstances, it was hard to believe that life with her would have been productive of further happiness."

"She had learnt the lesson of renunciation, and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun. If her earthly career had taught her few book philosophies it has at least well practised her in this. Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared love, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him."

Sigh...good book. I might have to read more Thomas Hardy! :-)