Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Winter looms here in Maine and I am feeling stymied about what to read next.  During cold weather I usually immerse myself in a long-term reading project, something that will both stretch my intellectual capacity and lend a sense of purpose to what otherwise might look like simply giving up and going off to bed at seven or eight p.m. every evening.  In a word, hibernating.  But if I do so with tome in hand, I can instead say to myself, I'm reading volume VI of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, or I'm reading volume III of The Letters of Samuel Johnson, or One more week and I will have finished all of Montaigne's Essays!  Two birds with one stone - books become building blocks for a kind of blissful self-education which thankfully has no end, and the winter passes by imbued with a greater sense of purpose.  This has been an organic process, as usually books present themselves at regular intervals, practically begging to be read next.  I develop an interest, then a tendency, then books collect in little windrows around these topics, whatever they might be, and I am all set for another couple of months.  But this year, no such luck.  The books on my bedside table tell the tale.  They are all over the place.  An art book, another art book, a third art book, a biography of a writer, a history book, some collected essays.

A few ideas involving reading something more challenging did flit across my mind, but were only met with rejection.  For example.   

Shakespeare?  I have a parent who has been immersed in the plays and poetry for decades, and frankly (and sadly) the works of the bard make me a little nauseous at this point.

Proust?  Again with the parents - my biological father says my mother divorced him because he spent an entire winter sitting in a chair reading Proust and smoking his pipe.  Needless to say this is not my mother's version of events.  I have given Proust a try, twice, and can't get past Within a Budding Grove.  I chalk it up to childhood conditioning.

Anthony Powell?  I've owned a set of A Dance to the Music of Time for fifteen years.  Actually I had two sets, the attractive paperbacks from the University of Chicago Press, and the U.S. first editions.  I sold the first editions a few years ago in one of my attempts to downsize the contents of our book room.  Having two sets of the same books that I may never read, well.  One set is enough.  Of books that I may never read.  (I mean, for god's sake.)  Now I find myself eyeing the paperbacks as well, and thinking, Fifteen years?  Unread?  Off with their heads!

Angela Thirkell?  Now we're getting somewhere.  I have had multiple recommendations regarding this writer, of whom I know little and have read less.  And yet I find myself with eight of her books.  Eight!  And there's an Angela Thirkell Society!  Stumbling blocks: I'd need to acquire reprints of her early books, since I'd want to read them in chronological order; and, her books are mostly set in Trollope's Barsetshire, and I have read zero Trollope, so her allusions will be lost on me.  Should I read Trollope first?  People I know and respect love Trollope.  The whole problem seems overwhelming, and so my Thirkell books languish, unread. 

Thus I find myself seriously considering re-reading all of Patrick O'Brian.  For the fifth time.  Help!  Is anyone reading anything absolutely splendid?