The Furze and the Gloom

New hobby, at age 73: Re-reading all the books in my house i’ve had since … high school? College? … whose crumbling, yellowed pages have been gathering dust for decades on my shelves and whose plots and characters’ names i could not tell you at knifepoint. Today i finished “Return of the Native,” by Thomas Hardy, a prolix Victorian-era fellow who i believe was paid by the word. This 360-pager was an “abridged edition,” i noticed halfway through it. TIP: If you skip all the descriptions of the drear and the drip and the gloom and the furze as the protagonists walk along the heath, it woul make a good 20-page love story.

My favorite thing in finding this book was the inside front cover, where i had proudly written my name with the precious little circle above the “i” that was, when i bought it as a 14-year-old, the last letter of my first name (i have long since reclaimed my “e”). And to be sure that, if you found it in 1964 and thought perhaps it belonged to some OTHER Geni Abrams, i added, “Homeroom 105, Albany High School.” Today, as i consign this tome to the Purple Heart box, i smile, “Hello, 14-year-old self!” to the writer of that signature. And, “Goodbye.”

Finished this book today, 60 years after i bought it. loove some of hardy’s poems, especially “channel firing,” but this “abridged” version of “Return of the native” could profitably have been about 340 pages shorter. disagree? let me know!