Amazon just recommended Midnight in Austenland to me.

Over on LibraryThing there's a group for Geeks who love Classics (or something), and Trollope was mentioned. I hopped over to Gutenberg, and yes, lots of Trollope, so I can dump oodles onto my Nook and catch up with a recommended author. But where do I start?

IE, What Trollopes do the Buffistas recommend? (I love saying his name, and I wonder if it's coincidence that loose women are also referred to as trollops.)

But where do I start?

JZ's a big fan and has read most of them. (There's a lot.) I'm sure she'd have some advice on the matter.

She loves how he writes women characters.

I started one of the famous ones a few years ago, and I got bored with the very typical English noblefolk. I keep expecting the women to get more assertive than they would in a book of that era, and I forget to change my behavior expectations for the characters. Possibly not a good idea to go straight from a fantasy with a kickass female warrior character to a book where the most aggressive a woman is likely to get is to argue about the man she's expected to marry. A lady in the Pump Room at Bath is not likely to pull a dagger out of her bodice and stab her rival--at least not in Trollope's novels. I'm sure there are some books where she would.

I love Framley Parsonage; in the midst of her pain and longing and confusion, the heroine is such a deliciously snarky little wiseass (Trollope consciously modeled her after As You Like It's Rosalind).

The Eustace Diamonds is lively and fast-moving and has an enjoyably loathesome yet pitiable anti-heroine.

And He Knew He Was Right is harrowing and loaded with assumptions about the till-death-do-you-partness of marriage, but a great, great read about a weak, pasty young Othello who has a really pretty fantastic life and methodically destroys it, and his own sanity, essentially acting as his own Iago. Not by any means a fun read, but very gripping, and for anyone who's been caught in that ugly spiral of self-hate and paranoia egging each other on it's uncomfortably dead-on.

Othello as a one-man show?

Isn't The Eustace Diamonds the first of the Palliser novels? Loved the (really, really long) series.

The Eustace Diamonds is lively and fast-moving and has an enjoyably loathesome yet pitiable anti-heroine.

I just added this to my kindle. I love "buying" books for free.

Othello as a one-man show?

Sort of, except with a wife and small child along for the ride.

The Way We Live Now is also a pretty good standalone.

And, yeah, the Palliser series is great, but since it's many thousands of pages of series, I hesitate to recommend the whole thing to a complete newbie.

(However, it's also crucial to AVOID the abridged Palliser series -- there was an excellent BBC miniseries in the '70s, a lovely thing in and of itself but accompanied by an abomination of a novelization, in which the condenser hacked out all the slow sluggish non-plot-advancing vignettes that did nothing but add richness and nuance to the characters. Unfortunately, character nuance is Trollope's greatest strength and, by his own admission, his plots were very very average at best. So reading a Trollope series stripped down to its plotty bare bones is like trying to choke down a bowl of dry flour and being told it's French toast stripped down to its essence.)

Thanks, JZ. I'll start with the Eustace Diamonds. Are there any that you would not recommend?

The Small House at Allington has always irritated the hell out of me, and I think the premise of Can You Forgive Her? can be difficult for modern audiences to swallow. If you've read and loved a few Trollopes already and you're comfortable entering his world and accepting the prejudices and limitations of the people in it, it's sympathetic and painful and heartbreaking, but it's definitely something that will leave a bad taste in your mouth if it's the first Trollope you read.

Small House at Allington I've just got nothing good to say about; it's fast paced and eminently readable, but the main characters make me go so HULK SMASH I can't even be rational about the good points.