infinite stfu

[lotesse]

rargh reading Trollope (Can You Forgive Her?) and wanting to wallbang so hard. Is he worth it? should I skim or wikipedia and pretend I finished it? Six hundred more pages of this! I wouldn't mind the boredom so much if he'd stop breaking the fourth wall to lecture me on the silliness of my ideas that my selfhood should be central to my life-choices!

Comments

[schemingreader]

What do you mean by "worth it"? I remember enjoying that book very much, and then finally getting to one of his novels with a strongly anti-Semitic characterization. (I know he wrote a novel against fashionable anti-Semitism, but that didn't stop him dealing in stereotypes himself.) Then I didn't want to read anymore. Do you have to read this book even if you don't like it, for school?

[lotesse]

I have this whole baby Victorianist thing going on, you know, and I'm trying not to be That Scholar, the one who hasn't actually read any of the relevant novels! So I ought to read it, as I ought to read everything - but I will confess that I have let myself out of books before. Too many novels around to work through the ones I really dislike!

What did you like about the book? Hearing what other people loved can often help me fall in love too, if I'm having difficulty in doing so.

[schemingreader]

I did all my Trollope reading before 2005, when I started journaling and writing reviews. I think I must have had the bad experience--it was probably with He Knew He Was Right? I can't remember which book was which! That's a long time ago. I even searched my email, and the only reference I found was in 2005 right before I started journaling to having lost my taste for his books and being ready to give them away. It was one of those things where I was really into him for a few novels and then felt betrayed.

So what did I like? Well, I was into that whole ornate Victorian style. I liked the jokes. I was not put off by the romance, which frankly isn't that different from reading a long slash fan fic. (And I wasn't reading slash at the time, so...I can't say if I have that insight right!)

Do you like other Victorian writers? Mrs Gaskell? I liked her books, even though they were sometimes emotionally over the top. Dickens, whom I so far have never gotten into but some people love? Do you have to like them, or just read them? You could always just read and write spiteful comments in your notes.

[lotesse]

I'm crazy about Victorian novels - hence the professionalization! But I tend to like women's 19th cent. books a great deal better than men's, both for the sexual politics and because I just enjoy them more. Gaskell, Eliot, the Brontës, Austen - but also Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird and Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Mary Shelley! I loathe Dickens, have guarded affection for Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy and Arthur Conan Doyle, and am totally crazy for Oscar Wilde.

And I gotta say, for long/ornate Victorian realism, I'll take Eliot over Trollope any day!

[schemingreader]

Well, I say, read it and critique the hell out of it. Bad dates, bad jobs, bad family events--they're all fodder for stories. Why not bad books? Or even, good books with bad...stuff in them.

[schemingreader]

You know, Anthony Trollope's mom was a novelist too. I've never read her books. It might be interesting to compare them.