Well, the cover came off The Idiot. It was expected, but now I can't impress people on the bus because they won't know what I'm reading. I wonder if other passengers think like me: that the main concern of everyone else is -- me! What hat am I wearing (this has come up as a topic, actually)? What am I reading? How many pages have I read? Will I get off at the usual place?

How boring their lives must be if that's all they can find to think about.

I'm on p. 183 of the Signet Classic paperback edition, and I'm liking The Idiot very much now. It took weeks to struggle past the first chapter, but now, I care. I always have trouble keeping names straight in translated books (for they are foreign to me) and there are a myriad characters in The Idiot. So I'm concentrating on only a few, and just sort of cruising past the others. I'm sure glad I didn't live in 18th Century Russian Society (or did I???) -- the things that "scandalize" those poor, weak creatures -- like the look on someones face. What babies. If your sense of dignity depends on what someone else is wearing, or whom they chose to "receive", then it's fragile indeed. Those Russkies could use some sort of revolution, or maybe a dictatorship of the proletariat or something.

I read Fathers and Sons by Turgenev a couple of years ago. I remember it as being a struggle also -- though it's a much shorter book. But it makes a key point about manners: "Man is capable of understanding everything -- the vibration of ether and the radiation of the sun; but he can never comprehend why another person should blow his nose in a manner different from his own."

That was spoken by the main character, the "Outsider", which is a type Turgenev evidently invented (though it wasn't perfected until the TV show Have Gun, Will Travel).