CATCH-UP TIME and DOWNTON ABBEY

It's far past catch-up time, but here we are together again. As this is a literary blog, here's the latest in that department. In The Book Thief, a book given to me, ordered for me, brand new, I lack only 75 pages out of 550, which, I trust, will be completed tonight. Itching to get ahead, I've also read the preface and the first two chapters of Unbroken. Many of you readers have probably seen the movie  of this book, but I have not, and do not anticipate doing so. I much prefer reading the book to seeing the movie of it. I like to do my own thinking. 

I did my bit for the writers' group here and gave away four books, or at least I tried to. Two of them were autobiographies of Nobel Prize winners. The books traveled around in the circle but no one opted to take one for himself, and they were left to go on the library shelves.  

The new project at hand is critiquing a short book by an Idaho writer whom I have not met in person. I've discovered how to do that on the screen by using a click with red ink, so to speak. How excellent that is, but I've hardly started. There is not enough time to do any of these things and I have yet to write some 2014 Christmas letters! My eyesight grows dimmer by the day, it seems. The television is mostly not on at all.

 The one program I watched last year the few months it ran, and the years before that, and which resumed this January, Downton Abbey, was a great disappointment with this year's first airing. There were too many people in the action and apparently few of them had learned to act on the stage. Therefore, they were not easily understood in their run-away British lingo. My guess is that many Americans stopped watching it because of these reasons. More interesting is the hour before the program starts each season that showcases the real people who live at Highclere Castle. If you Abbey watchers missed that, remember to see it next January. It's great.