Dickens

[lesbiassparrow]

I am beginning to believe that I will never finish Barnaby Rudge. I keep carrying this book around with me under the belief that I will be forced to finish it from a sheer lack of anything else to read. Results: last trip I ended up reading wood-working magazines because they were all that was to hand other than (of course) the dreaded Barnaby Rudge. I am thinking of building a coffee table out of gratitude to said magazines.

Tomorrow I head out of town and Barnaby Rudge will once more accompany me. Hopefully this post will be the spur that I need to finish this book.

Strangely, I can't for the life of me work out why I feel compelled to finish it. Normally, I'd just give up, but for some reason this book has a lasting grip on me that I can't escape. I have a feeling that even if I was to 'lose' it somewhere it would turn up again on my desk. Maybe Dickens is reaching out from beyond the grave? Or maybe it's just my well-developed guilt complex?

Comments

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I do this as well. How long is it, and how far do you have to go?

Sometimes I will break up what's left into sections, and allow myself other reads in the middle. This worked best when alternating Clarissa with shorter sections from The Lord of the Rings (which is about a third of the length). It's proving a dismal failure with The Wings of the Dove, I just keep going out and reading entire novels and I'm still only 150-odd pages into it. Or was it 50?

I have a couple more Dickens novels to read over the summer for my course next semester, plus various other long novels about industrialisation in the 19th C, so I'm having to force myself as well. (I don't like Dickens.) I'm managing to get it done by seeing it as work avoidance from my dissertation.

[lesbiassparrow.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I'm not the only one with this problem. I did actually manage to progress about 60 more pages into Barnaby; I'm now at page 167 (it's around 700 pages long).

And I understand about dissertation avoidance, I became quite expert in that skill. Now that I think about it I may have bought Barnaby Rudge in the first place as a feverish attempt to avoid writing mine. Good luck with yours - I just finished mine, so I know it's possible to actually get them completed. Possible, but painful.

Clarissa? You must be a stalwart soul. I've started that book three times and each time given up at the 100 page mark. Is it worth slogging through to the end? And is it shameful to buy an abbreviated version? I've failed at reading the full version but I think I might be actually able to managed a shortened one. I'm not a huge Richardson fan: I only managed to finish Pamela because I was reading it alongside Shamela which made her amazing virtue bearable.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I read it mostly out of literary guilt. No, probably not, but I never believe people who tell me that. I told a friend that Moby Dick really wasn't worth it, it begins excitingly and then spends hundreds of pages going on about whales. He gave up in the end.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I meant "no, probably not worth it" - I DEFINITELY read it out of guilt!