I may have confused some of you with titling my personal site “Delicious Reverie”. So I’m going to attempt to explain my decision, and discuss perhaps the greatest work of fiction ever produced in either French or English…

Why not benread.com? #

Yeah. Check it out: https://benread.com. That’s not me. That’s the other guy, named Ben Read, who happens to be a web developer. I’m sure he’s a lot better at it than me.

Hilariously enough, I was contacted by a headhunting organisation recently who thought I was him; and I thankfully realised and straightened him out before things got really interesting.

A State of Mind #

So, I went with deliciousreverie.co.uk for this reason. At the time I conceived this blog, I was about 2 years into reading the formidable tome Les Miserables, in English, by Victor Hugo. I love that book. As well as the melancholy characters it contains, I loved the realism of France in the 1700s and was immediately drawn to Victor Hugo’s thoughtful, at times poignant, prose.

There’s one scene that I particularly loved, when a minor character, Monsieur Mabeuf, has been listening to his housekeeper relate a story from one of his old books. The old man appreciates the book anew in explaining to his housekeeper what she has been reading. The last line simply says:

“And Monsieur Mabeuf fell into a delicious reverie” #

It’s out of these delicious reveries—or silent meditations if you like—that so many of our good ideas come. There is little more poignant than sitting and considering, of allowing the mind to think freely and contemplate whatever it will: a particular problem we’re facing, an action we’re about to take, or just to take a minute to appreciate strange life.”