Reflections on a Sick Day

So on Sunday, I had a fever and body aches for most of the day.  And despite my initial panic related to swone flu, I now seem to have recovered.  But yesterday, Monday, I stayed home from work.  I should add that there was no real reason I needed to go into work.  We're in final exam week, and I didn't have any finals to administer on Monday.  So a sick day, a do nothing day seemed in order.

One thing I did with my sick day was to get caught up on some reading I'd been meaning to do.  I read the first 150 or so pages of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White.  Collins is a contemporary of Dickens and writes in the same sort of way.  Anyway, here's something I've noticed only recently:  I really, really enjoy the Victorian "triple decker" novel.  This is worthy of comment only because for years I maintained that, with a few notable exceptions, the long, Dickensian novel was not for me.  And Dickens himself rather annoyed me, with the exception of A Christmas Carol.  But last summer, I read Collins's The Moonstone and enjoyed it.  I also read Dickens's Bleak House, not so much because I wanted to but because I thought it was something I should read at least once in my life.  Much to my amazement, I really, really enjoyed Bleak House and would like to move on to either The Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend.  So do our reading tastes change as we get older?  When I think of the books I really, really loved as a child and young adult, I know that I still really, really love these works--The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Frankenstein, The Wind in the Willows, Little House in the Big Woods, which is by the way the first chapter book I read at the ripe old age of six.  But I'm also finding that I'm growing to love works that didn't appeal to me, not at all, when I was younger.