I fear this may have been the wrong week to read about the exploits of self-serving Edward Waverley and his flip-flopping political alliances. 

Also, this has been a tremendous slog...

There are interesting bits, tho, and I hope to mention them in a more coherent review later. 

Right now, I need a very different book.

Well, at least I made some real progress with this book tonight. I shall finish it tomorrow.

The plot has thickened!

Edward is in a pickle now having overstretched his Army leave and consorted with Jacobites, and we also have a romance going on.

It's still not going to be a favourite book.

Edward assented to her praises so far as he understood them, yet could not help regretting that she was condemned to such a perilous and dismal life.

'Oich! for that,' said Evan, 'there is nothing in Perthshire that she need want, if she ask her father to fetch it, unless it be too hot or too heavy.'

'But to be the daughter of a cattle-stealer—a common thief!'

'Common thief!—no such thing: Donald Bean Lean never LIFTED less than a drove in his life.'

'Do you call him an uncommon thief, then?'

'No; he that steals a cow from a poor widow, or a stirk from a cotter, is a thief; he that lifts a drove from a Sassenach laird is a gentleman-drover. And, besides, to take a tree from the forest, a salmon from the river, a deer from the hill, or a cow from a Lowland strath, is what no Highlander need ever think shame upon.'

LoL. It is amusing, but... so horribly affected. I'm cringing a lot reading this book.

I can see how this would have been a ripping read in the 1800s. I really can.

It's a window into an entirely different world - and people wouldn't have known how much of it would have been fiction. 

Reading this now, tho, it feels way too ... nostalgic ... for me. I mean, obviously the subtitle of the book is a give-away that the narrator tells of events 60 years ago (the book was published in 1814) and some nostalgia is inevitable in the narration, but this is all a bit OTT for me.