All year, I’ve been promising myself that one Monday, I would lie in bed until lunchtime, reading a book and thumbing my nose at the workaday world that normally rules my life.
Today, I did just that.
In an instant, my cat Lucy Locket—a main-chancer as all her species are—was up on the bed and ready for a daytime nap. Even the flash of the camera didn’t dissuade her. She was staying put for the morning too! I laughed when I saw this picture with the ghostly eyes—my spooky little cat was born on Halloween, so it’s her seventh birthday on Thursday.
Halloween birthday girl-to-be Lucy Locket gets spooky on Monday morning.
Picture by Caron Eastgate Dann
And I did read away the rest of the morning. I’ve always loved lying on my bed and reading, since I was a small child. There’s something enormously decadent about it—yet you feel smug that you’re not wasting time, because you’re engaged with literature, after all.
What I’m reading though—oh my! It’s the wonderful novel The Luminaries, which has just won the Man Booker Prize for its 28-year-old writer, my compatriot Eleanor Catton. (I will write more on The Luminaries in a separate post when I’ve finished it).
For now, I am lost in this story set in and around the goldfields of New Zealand’s South Island in the 1860s.
While I’m reading, and the rain is falling gently outside, and the cat snuggles closer, the rest of the world has slipped away.
The Crayon Files 
I love lying in with a good book and have so many ways of justifying that decadence to myself…I deserve a morning break every once in a while, it’s raining so I can’t do the stuff I planned to do, staying in bed saves having to put the fire on to stay warm, the girls are still asleep so I might as well enjoy the calm before the storm, etc, etc, etc…
We were talking about The Luminaries last night over our pizza and beer dinner but didn’t know anyone who had actually read it yet to confirm that the 800 odd pages are worth it so will be looking foward to your thoughts on it…
Well, historical novels are my thing, although I’ll read just about any genre. The 800-page length was a consideration for me, too, but I haven’t read a big book this year (though Possession, by A. S. Byatt, was 513 pages), so it’s time. I love Catton’s precise vocabulary and the way she can tease out a sentence to paint a picture in the mind’s eye. Fabulous.
good one 🙂 🙂
Thanks, Tarek!
so great you did this!
I know! I want to do it again soon. Everyone deserves time out.
Lucky you to have that time to just read! And it’s obvious who rules the roost from that great ‘photo! 🙂
Yes, it was a lovely morning. And definitely, Lucy Locket rules our house. She is a bossy little thing, as well as spooky.
Well, what a way to start the day. I vote for more time in bed reading. I do it all of the time. I’m home most of the time, and I indulge in that wonderful pastime.
Now, The Luminaries, that’s another story. I’ll look for your review. But I’m looking for
shorter tomes these days.
Yes, reading in bed is wonderful. I agree with you on preferring shorter books. Actually, I read The Luminaries on my Kindle, so I wasn’t so put off by what a thick tome it was. It was worth reading for the beautiful use of language alone. I have a particular interest in the South Island of NZ, having been born there, and in 19th-century history, so it was a book I had to read. But my favourite length of novel is probably about 300 pages, not 832!