Today's reading from Eat Love Ni-na-ni-na Bleak Anna

As some of you know, I ward off the winter blues by reading certain books that I consider to be the literary equivalent of comfort food. This year, through a series of (happy?) accidents, I have ended up simultaneously re-reading Bleak House and Anna Karenina while reading Eat Pray Love for the first time.

Today is a gray, gloomy, rainy, raw day so I thought I would take a little teeny break from work to do some comfort reading. And how could I deny you this pleasure? I will not.

Gather 'round.

It was my most sincere belief when I left my husband that we would settle our practical affairs in a few hours with a calculator, some common sense and a bit of goodwill toward the person we'd once loved. My initial suggestion was that we sell the house and divide all the assets fifty-fifty; it never occurred to me we'd proceed in any other way. He didn't find this suggestion fair. So I upped my offer, even suggesting this different kind of fifty-fifty split: What if he took all the assets and I took all the blame? But not even that offer would bring a settlement. Now I was at a loss. How do you negotiate once you've offered everything? I could do nothing now but wait for his counterproposal.

Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity.

"We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight," says the Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question of costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will come to a settlement one of these days.

What was particularly annoying was that Levin could not begin to understand whom he was contending with, and who profited by the delay in terminating his business. It seemed that no one, including his legal adviser, knew this. If Levin had understand why, just as he realized the only way to get a train ticket was to stand in line in front of a ticket window, then he wouldn't have been irritated or offended; but no one could explain to him just why all the obstacles he kept running into existed at all.