I liked Ethan Frome well enough. It certainly got its point across, and the irony of the resolution is bitter and twisted.

It's also quite a change from Wharton's other work, which is all set in a very different class and social structure. Although I suppose the class issues and concern with money are a common thread.

is it OK to repeatedly kick Ethan in the kidneys, at least?

Yes, that is a legitimate response; double, if you come from New England.

To start Dickens, start short. So, 900-page Bleak House, although I love love love it, is probably not a starter, with the complex plots and subplots and craziness (although it involves spontaneous human combustion!). Hard Times is short & efficient, but its ends 50 pages after it ought. Great Expectations, also short, also a dissatisfying ending. A Tale of Two Cities, probably the most ludicrous of these 3 short novels, but I think the most satisfying and the most fun.

I think the reason I have failed with Middlemarch is that it doesn't have a single protagonist. I have a great deal of trouble keepign track when there's more than one protagonist in a novel that long/complex -- to handle Bleak House, I had to read chapters out loud, and keep notes. And even now, I've forgotten about 80% of the characters' names, and why so-and-so is murdered, and what the point was of Crazy Chancery Lady. But Esther Summerson stays in my mind!

As I said yesterday, I do read a lot of Da Classix. But even reading 100% classics, I'd never get around to all of them at the rate I read. So there's going to be picking and choosing, and it's kind of obnox to slag one for not reading, say Joyce, when one is busy reading, say, Dickens. Unless one wants to get into a Great Authors Deathmatch, which hey sounds kind of fun.

I would be, in theory, interested in a Buffista book club, and would be willing to read almost anything that was available in libraries.

However, given that in the last year I have read about 4 books, due to having way too much of a life to have time to read except during 10-minute bus rides, I doubt I could keep up. There's a reason I read for pleasure (and pleasure for me lately has been Verlyn Klinkenborg, Billy Collins, Laura Hillenbrand) and things that are "easy" and episodic. It's hard to focus on a bus when you know you have 10 minutes.

MaryAnn Evans.

I liked Middlemarch from the start, and am puzzled that Nutty made it through Daniel Deronda, which drags more and ... well, Daniel Deronda makes me love George Eliot for trying so earnestly to get beyond the prejudices of her time. It does not make me love Daniel Deronda, who gets larded with all the deadly appurtances of a Role Model, and one for a historical movement with which I have personal issues, besides. If only he'd been allowed to be human, like Gwendolen, or Gwendolen's bastard of a husband, the book would have worked much better.

--And one of the reasons I don't think the thread is as conducive to in-depth discussion of books as other threads are to shows is timing and depth and familiarity; which is to say that I haven't read Middlemarch as many times or as recently as I've watched Buffy episodes, so anything I can say is going to be vaguer and less substantiated by textual backup.

But things I particularly liked about MM were the so-hated omniscient voice, and the way the text of the book would actually sometimes subtly argue against it (the "author", I think, was much more dismissive of poor Rosamond than the book itself was); the use of science as a metaphor to structure the book; the thorough, deep constrast of people and relationships.

And I also like it in retrospect because of the way A.S. Byatt uses it as a model -- you can see the difference between The Shadow of the Sun, where Byatt was clearly influenced by Elizabeth Bowen, and the Potter Quartet, after she'd discovered Eliot. I love Bowen; but Eliot works much better for Byatt. She needs the structure and the science the permission to write cohesive social theories or characters who try to formulate them.

I love David James Duncan. I devoured The Brothers K, but I didn't get the full love-on until I read The River Why. I'm not a fishing kind of girl, though I am in a family of outdoorspeople and I adored that book.

I do my discussions elsewhere and on one book I read a month, not on everything.

Yep! Totally. One of my knitting friends and I were talking about The Red and The Black the other day and it prompted me to pick it up and re-skim it because I loved what she said. So, I'm like you...I' get my book stuff in other places.

Though I'm considering doing a Bookpile website or LJ where people can leave their reviews and thoughts of what they are reading, mainly to give my students a place to review books.

Hec, I will, but I have to say first that my heart is breaking hard right now because Dombey and Son is my very favorite Dickens ever, and I can only attribute Consuela's hatred for it to the incompetence of whoever taught it. It has in Susan Nipper the greatest woman Dickens ever wrote (when I grow up, how I hope to be half the woman Susan Nipper is) and his greatest comic character, the sublime, ignobly majestic Mister Toots, about whom I will say nothing more because Chesterton said it far more eloquently and heartbreakingly in his appreciation of Dickens, which everyone should run out and read right now. It's very clearly a book that Mervyn Peake drew on heavily in crafting the first of the Ghormenghast novels. It contains the only child death in Dickens, and one of the only child deaths in all of literature, that makes me sob every time I read it. It's alive and rich and riotous in the old anarchic Pickwick way without flying apart the way Pickwick does, and unified and serious and meditative in the later Dickens-the-Serious-Writer way without bogging down in its own seriousness. It soars and it makes me want to weep with laughter and I sincerely and utterly hate Suela's high school experience for making her hate it, because there's so much in it that is deeply lovable.

City of Literature next.

yeah analysis is not so much my cup. I do brief stuff on my bookshelf at bookcrossing (where I list every thing I read, not only what I release), but it's really really brief and more like "I liked it", "I didn't" - occasionally I try to say why, but not often.

Actually a bookclub on lj would be a good idea actually. I am not sure I could swing two bookclubs a month, but I might could, especially if one was a mystery/suspense/thiller bookclub. Oh, I may start that up over there.

Frankly, the one thing I remember about Dombey is that I skipped 200 pages in the middle and still aced the final. Which I interpreted to mean that nothing of any importance happened in the middle. ::shrugs::

Maybe someday I'll get back to Dickens, but it's not on the short list. Right now I'm waiting for my copy of The Long Goodbye to come in.

And last night I finished House of the Scorpion, which Nutty had generously left with me. Excellent YA novel, full of thoughtful policial, social, and scientific speculation about the drug wars, and the implications of cloning and genetic manipulation. Good stuff.

Namely, that because I pretty much listen to mainstream rock music, readily available on the radio, that my opinion is flat out ignored by most people in there? I go to sleep now, and await the massive flaming I will receive whilst I'm gone.

t flames Sean massively, to a Bon Jovi beat

Any reason why we don't pop this proposal into the B'crazy thread and get this party started right?

None. Go. Do.

My mom is an absolute Dickens freak.

I remember fondly a sketch making fun of the names in Dickens' novels. ("And this is my associate, Charles Itsy-Bitsy-Teeny-Weeny-Yellow-Polka-Dot-Bikini.")

How come? I've been meaning to read it for years, having loved C & P so much.

I liked them both, though preferred C & P, and had great sympathy for James Herriot (IIRC) who kept it by his bed because he found that a single sentence with more than one character's full name in it was enough to send him to sleep. But it also gave me a drunken Alexei Sayle, hands balled into fists explaining to one guy that "'Ere -- I've got "WAR" tattooed on this 'and, "PEACE" tattooed on this 'and, and "THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV" up me spine".

Huh. Apparently all my lit crit happens in comedy sketches.

However, resentment about canonical good books, and being beaten around the head with Must Read and Must Respect has fostered a vibe in here such that poor, whiny, weak Mme. Bovary gets kicked in the teeth, and punched in the kidneys every time she wanders into this thread.

Hec, I'm sure you didn't intend to, but your post could be read to suggest that we Must Love and Respect the Canon.

How we feel about a particular work isn't always rational. To go outside the canon, I read the first Thieves' World anthology at just the wrong moment. I needed something light and fluffy. TW is very dark. And while I recognize that it was good fantasy, I didn't like it. (Tangential -- which is why I rate Mike Resnick so highly. I wanted light, he gave me dark, and I loved every word of it -- But to continue.) Vice versa, I read Chris Stasheff's The Warlock in Spite of Himself at the end of a rough period in my life -- and loved it because it was just what I needed. Great Lit? No. But it got me over my troubles for a while, and there's a virtue in that.

And often, that irrationality is triggered because of the Must Read and Must Respect catchphrases. Especially when you're 13 and getting those vibes from the teacher who can make you read it.

Maybe the answer is to recognize that something is My Issue and not a reflection on the book itself. Or simply that so much of this is subjective and interactive.