I'm joining in the bookish meme hosted by MizB of the Should Be Reading blog and posting what I'm reading today. My wordpress skills are not up to the formatting of MizB or Julia, so forgive me. But my reading at the moment, continuing my recent return to giant nonfiction tomes, is The Victorians by A.N. Wilson. It's one of those grabbag compendium popular histories -- I'm only 88 pages in but it seems to jump around a lot. I suspect I'll learn quite a bit by the time I finish though I'm dubious about how much I'll retain. I've read the first two volumes of James/Jan Morris' Victorian trilogy -- Heaven's Command and Pax Britannica -- and the only thing I remember is that the Brits got slaughtered in Afghanistan trying to get through the Khyber Pass.

Anyway here's the random excerpt:

" The Queen had been in effect an only child -- though she had a half-sister she was brought up as a solitary, uncertain of her mother's love and yet monarch of all she surveyed. ... Neither from parent nor from first-born son could the consolations of affection be found, nor the even more deeply consoling qualities of dependability, obedience, affection for her whims."