No Brainer

 As my excellent friend Linda proposed this morning: No Brainer.

As I've proposed, my enthusiasm for winter in Vermont is at its nadir.

2025 Readings 10

 I'm in the midst of a couple massive tomes, so, for the purposes of this count, it seems like I've stopped reading, but rather math (as usual) or maybe just logistics, is my enemy. I just finished a collection of Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens (which was also, obviously, not a short read). Some of them I was familiar with because I've read them in his collection of Christmas stories, but they plucked a couple ghosts stories out of The Pickwick Papers and included them in this collection. The observation I shared with Janet while reading these stories is that Dickens clearly needed space. It's funny how he can effortlessly tie dozens of characters and a convoluted plot together in an eight-hundred page novel, but somehow he simply doesn't do it as well in a shorter format. He couldn't seem to strip down the story to fit the more limited space, so sometimes his shorter works were a bit jarring and confusing. There are exceptions, of course, because it's difficult to imagine a more perfectly constructed story than A Christmas Carol. It was a good collection to read in the middle of a Vermont winter and during the holiday season as their are spirits everywhere.