I've been tempted to read Wilkie Collins, but I'm afraid of running into the "We're British, we're here to help you poor benighted savages achieve your place in civilization as our servants, you lucky creatures" thing.
There's a bit of ooo-spooky-heathens in The Moonstone, since it's about a stolen Indian gem. But not paternalism, I don't think.
The Woman In White doesn't have any of that, but it might be harder to take because for a contemporary reader, a couple of the plot twists are obvious several miles off. But it has a
fantastic
villain which totally makes up for that.
You do have to bear in mind that they were published as serials and there are plenty of (un)lucky coincidences. And that a large portion of The Moonstone was written while Collins was addicted to opium. I liked The Moonstone more, because I think the characters are more entertaining on reread, but they're both good fun.
Plus, The Woman in White was made into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, so you can visualize Michael Crawford in a fat suit, playing the villain. Isn't that a bonus?!?
...Why.... why would you say such a thing?
While napping I had on an MST3K episode where Joel's invention is the "Andrew Lloyd Webber grill." You cook things on his burning scripts.
Dana, my eyes, my eyes! You suck!
The Count is by far the most interesting character in that novel.
Stendahl's "The Red and the Black" is a frequently overlooked book that everybody should read.
Weird. I just started that.
I have read The Moonstone, but never got past the first chapter of The Woman in White (not because it was bad, just circumstances). I quite liked The Moonstone.
i'm reading "In Cold Blood" right now. It's... not actually that great, so far. Kind of boring. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" was a significantly more fun read, to me.
So many things set up as The Gold Standard end up that way. Maybe it gets better though.
Although some things are Had to Be There books. Like we can't possibly appreciate them the way they did when they came out.
So I used my Walden Pond gift certificate on two whole books. Since it was a gift certificate, I decided to buy books people had fervently recommended to me. One was
The Good Soldier.
The man approved my selection, saying it was a great book. I told him a friend had recommended it to me because she adored it and no one knew about it. He countered that last statement by noting that I had found a Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century edition; it was one of the greats! I said that, okay, but most people didn't know about it; I hadn't even heard of it until my friend told me.
"You have smart friends," he said.
I also mentioned that she recommended it to me, specifically, because I loved
The Remains of the Day,
and it took him a few seconds to remember who it was by, and then he mentioned how awful the movie was. He said they took the soul out of the book.
The other book I got was
Perdido Street Station,
which a friend of mine really loves. I'm not entirely sure how I'll like it, but it definitely sounds worth trying.
then he mentioned how awful the movie was.
And then you punched him in the nose?
...hmph.
But yeah,
The Good Soldier
always turns up on "great 20th C. novels" lists (
Parades End
does too, but a bit less frequently).
But there's not much popular awareness of Ford. I never would have heard of him if my prof hadn't been the type to go off on random tangents.
