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Completed	February 2010
Title	The Mayor of Casterbridge
Author	Thomas Hardy
Published	1886
Quote	"Though he was not a fortune-hunter, the possibility that Lucetta had been sublimed into a lady of means by some munificent testament on the part of this relative lent a charm to her image which it might not otherwise have acquired. He was getting on towards the dead level of middle age, when material things increasingly possess the mind."
Review	What a book. What part of Hardy don't I love? I just love the way Hardy writes, clear and simple. This book is an interesting tale of bad decisions and regret and redemption, or not. Just as in Tess of the D'Ubervilles, Hardy does such a great job of describing the English countryside, something near and dear to my heart. His descriptions of small-town life, the otherwise humdrum daily activities, the interactions between characters...well, I just love it. I was actually sad when I finished this book. I wanted it to go on. Here's a little passage for you. I hope you enjoy the language, the description. "In a lonely hamlet a few miles from the town-----so lonely that what are called lonely villages were teeming by comparison-----there lived a man of curious repute as a forecaster or weather-prophet. The way to his house was crooked and miry----even difficult in the present unpropitious season. One evening when it was raining so heavily that ivy and laurel resounded like distant musketry, and an out-door man could be excused for shrouding himself to his ears and eyes, such a shrouded figure on foot might have been perceived travelling in the direction of the hazel-copse which dropped over the prophet's cot. The turnpike-road became a lane, the land a cart-track, the cart-track a bridle-path, the bridle-path a foot-way, the foot-way overgrown. The solitary walker slipped here and there, and stumbled over the natural springes formed by the brambles, till at length he reached the house, which, with its gardens, was surrounded with a high, dense hedge. The cottage, comparatively a large one, had been built of mud by the occupier's own hands, and thatched also by himself. Here he had always lived, and here it was assumed he would die."

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