A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting. (Thoreau)

I like having ongoing projects – this blog is one of them, and it arose out of my earlier project of visiting a different church every Sunday for a year.

I’ve just begun a new project – reading all the novels Anthony Trollope wrote, in order. I’ve read large chunks of Trollope already (including the complete Palliser series), but it won’t be a hardship to read them again. Large amounts will have been forgotten, and will seem like new – and anyway, re-reading is one of the joys of being a reader.

So I’m one paragraph into his first novel, The MacDermotts of Ballycloran, and already there’s a highly quotable sentence:

There is a kind of gratification in seeing what one has never seen before, be it ever so little worth seeing; and the gratification is the greater if the chances be that one will never see it again.

Ah – spoken like a true traveler. And the sentiment works for those travelers who never get much past their own city or neighborhood as well as for those who seek out faraway lands. (I am reminded of Thoreau’s “I have travelled much in Concord,” and when I Googled that quotation to make sure I had it right, I found the one in the title of this post, which also seems appropriate here.)