First place goes to Henry James

Tonight I decided that I needed to read something that would improve my mind. I don't think my brain is getting as much exercise as it needs. I spend the majority of my day at work where I do rather mindless things and then I come home and try to recover from the drowsy-allergy-medicine feeling that my job induces by doing other (different) mindless things: watching hair tutorials on youtube, doing laundry, thinking about how much I should be doing useful things.

Bip.

Blip.

Bzzzzzp.

That's the sound of my IQ dropping a few points.

So I sat in front of the book shelf, determined to choose something "classic" and "of literary merit." After a while it came down to the books' nationality. It was a toss up between Russia, France, and America.

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Les Misérables/ The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James

I went with Portrait. I recently read Anna Karenina, so I'm already replete with the delights of Russian novels (long, dark, depressing, dense, but good!) for now. And frankly, I didn't feel like trying to pronounce the French names in my mind (heaven knows I'll say them wrong. Remember how everybody butchered Hermione's name? It's kind of like that). I haven't read anything by Henry James and the text was bigger on the page than the other books. Yep, text size was a consideration. (Baaashlep. There goes another IQ point.)