At one point in my life, I felt it a sort of Solemn Duty to finish every book I began, no matter how dismal I found it. Oddly enough, I think going to college and majoring in English cured me of that; good luck getting through that degree if you insist on reading everything you’re assigned. That said, there’s always a little bit of a guilty feeling when I decide to put a book to the side.
I began reading Adam Bede because The Valve had a summer reading project and decided to read it. Generally I enjoy collective reading projects, and when my own suggestion of Green Grass, Running Water wasn’t selected, I went along. I should have known better.
I have history with Nineteenth Century novelists. We don’t get along. Short stories, fine; poetry, fine; essays, fine; but the novel of the period seems turgid and, perhaps, lacking in scope. Adam Bede, for example, is a casualty of pacing. I read twenty-five chapters, and so far have learned:
- Adam Bede is honest, handsome, and skilled.
- Seth Bede is honest, but not as awesome as his brother.
- Arthur Donnithorne is a friendly sort, but a bit of a lightweight.
- Hetty Sorrel is pretty, but vapid and vain.
- Dinah Morris is pretty, but cold and holier-than-thou.
After three hundred pages, nothing of interest has happened. That’s a problem.
It’s interesting to me that a great number of people seem to think that the novel in English never rose to a higher level than it attained in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. There are still people who will say Dickens is the greatest novelist, with perhaps Austen a close second. I don’t understand this attitude, and I wonder whether these are the same sorts of people who feel that Shakespeare is the greatest English playwright and that Leonardo da Vinci was the greatest painter in history. All arts progress, and it seems an injustice that writers nearer our time get less credit than century-old pastorals and thinly-veiled morality plays.
Oh well; I think I will take a break from heavy reading and take a detour into escapism with Lois McMaster Bujold.