Finished!

Yes, after multiple attempts over who knows how many years, all it took for me to finish Mansfield Park was a 14 hour flight to Los Angeles. Come to think of it, it's entirely possible I first started reading the damn book when I lived here. 18 years ago. Actually, I had the book finished within a hour or two of taking off, and my satisfaction was entirely in relation to achieving the task, not the book itself. It just doesn't work for me. Fanny remains so wet all the way until the finish. The whole thing is resolved in a thrown together chapter at the end. I would have been more interested to follow Maria and Henry's illicit relationship than Fanny sitting around waiting for people to do things for her and make sure she gets enough exercise. Anyway, the classics project has now moved on to Dickens. I've never really been a huge Dickens fan, but I put that down to a couple of things. First, aside from A Christmas Carol, the first work of his I read was Dombey & Son, and I was compelled to do so by a class at university. Getting through such a tome on a deadline and with analysis required just wasn't the next way to go. Since then I've read Great Expectations, which was fine except I've never been a huge fan of the Downtrodden Child genre (on any re-read of Jane Eyre I skip all the school stuff). In this case, however, I've picked up Bleak House and have been whipping through it, quite enjoying it, even in a post-flight no-sleep addled state. So far, so promising. PS Excuse the lack of paragraphs, I'll fix them when I'm on a computer that will let me add them in.

Comments

[laslig]

That's interesting, because I read all the Austens at once, so they've all merged into one giant book in my head. But the main thing I remember about Mansfield Park is that it's the one I liked the most...

[Stomper Girl]

I've never read any Dickens but I absolutely LOVED the recent BBC series of Bleak House, and it was a corker of a story. I wasn't much into Mansfield Park either, although it has been a while since I read it.