I always keep a book on my smartphone so that I have something to do while waiting or during boring meeting. I love having a book anywhere I go, and there are so many classics that you can download for free; this is my favorite site: http://manybooks.net/categories/ .
This week I finished reading Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. It's basically a novel about how lies can come back to bite you in the ass.
It begins in a small town where a young man named Michael Henchard sells his wife and infant daughter after having a bit too much to drink. After he sobers up and realizes what he has done, he swears off the booze and builds a good life for himself. Twenty years later he is a very successful businessman and the mayor of Casterbridge - a town not too far from the place where he sold his family. When his wife returns with his daughter Elizabeth-Jane, he is torn between happiness at having a chance to make things right, and fear that his past indiscretions will be discovered by the townspeople and business associates.
A very complex web of lies is created as Henchard, his wive, and another woman from Henchard's past desperately try to safeguard their reputations. Unfortunately, the innocent Elizabeth-Jane is caught in the middle of all of the intrigue.
One of the things that makes this novel so interesting is that Henchard, his wife, and his mistress are not really bad people, but they make bad choices. Henchard's behavior makes him hard to like, but then he will turn around and do the right thing, or at least try to, and you suddenly have sympathy for him.
I give this book 4 gilded bird cages (a wedding present in the novel). The pets have no opinion on this novel because they lost their phone privileges last year, you wouldn't believe all of the scrapbooking crap they were buying from HSN.
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