Well. I have a few minutes and thought I would comment a moment on what I'm reading, which is Sybil, by Benjamin Disraeli. My Victorian prof informed us that the first 80 pages or so were pretty dry. She's right.
But it picks up and I am very much enjoying the rallying feeling of the spirit of Disraeli. Standing up for the poor, leaving behind the landed gentry and joining the plight of the prols! "Home is isolation, there for anti-social. What we want is COMMUNITY."The PEOPLE, he likes to write in capitals.
There are The great ass characters, like Lord Marney, the landowner and one-who-keeps-down-the-millions (that's my homage to Heidegger). "I say that a family can live well on eight shillings a week!"
Also, there is some great religious stuff going on. It's pretty good, after the slough of despond that is the first eighty pages.
Here's a passage I much enjoy: "The Church of Rome is to be respected ast he only Hebrao-Christian church extant; all other churches established by the Hebrew apostles have disappeared, but Rome remains, and we must never permit the exaggerated position which it assumed in the middle centuries to makes us forget its early and apostolic character, when it was fresh from Palestine, and as it were fragrant from Paradise." Not bad from the mouth of an Anglican Vicar.
I know many find Victorian literature boring and dull (which about fifty percent of this book is) but I thought I would let you all in on the good parts.
12 comments:
I have only just realized, czf, that victorian lit may be boring but only if you give up. The first five hundred pages of Middlemarch was touch and go, dull characters and so forth. Now however, 550 pages in and its just singing, and really quite exciting. A fine love story concerning two lost souls seperated by the morals of the landed gentry. I cant put it down.
I hope those excerpts aren't the ONLY good parts...
oh my dear. they are not.
fr, you are, as you have sometimes been known to be, correct.
bleak house was the same way, get into it a ways, and you can't put it down. its all about the characterization, which is remarkable, i think, in the victorians.
The Victorians are grand. Overall much better people than today's lot.
couldn't agree more, old chap.
boring.
Give me Hawthorne. Give me Melville. Give me Ellison. Geez, give me Fitzgerald.
Boo Wes! Boo!! The Victorian's rock! One might even call them The Rocktorians!
or you could call them the "ones-to whom-you-have-thank-for-Melville-Ellison-Fitzgerald-orians"
that doesn't really have the same ring, though.
Anthropologically, the victorians actually had more sex then any other culture in the history of the world. Just read John Fowles' slanderous, novel of victorian secrets, The French Lieutenant's Women, to find out how.
mmmmm....Victorian Secrets....I love Heidi Klum.
Anyway, I just thought everyone would like to know that I am re-reading the Narnia series. And damn is it an easy read, if I am saying that I think it means that you people could probably read a book an hour. Thats 7 hours for the whole series. readie people, thats what I am going to call you guys. Except for Spell-spell, he's still spell-spell.
mmmmm...Heidi Klum.
I suggest we organize a party in celebration of bm oran's discovery of the love of reading! :)
I always knew you had in you.
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