I evidently didn't take a long break from reading fiction, because I just recently finished reading Vanity Fair. I figured since I just read Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, I should read Thackeray's most well-known work. I'm glad I did. The book was often funny, very insightful, and occasionally romantic. Due to reading Barry Lyndon, I had no idea how it would proceed, since that book was so negative. Vanity Fair shares the same cynicism, but also has some more light-heartedness and a major characters who aren't complete jerks. I'm trying to get my wife to read it now, I think she would enjoy it.
The strange thing about the book is that one of the main characters is named Becky Sharp, and I'm pretty sure I knew someone by that name in my class in high school. Or maybe I'm just imagining things.
Also of note is that part of a passage from Vanity Fair gets used in Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon:
Here, before long, Becky received not only "the best" foreigners (as the phrase is in our noble and admirable society slang), but some of the best English people too. I don't mean the most virtuous, or indeed the least virtuous, or the cleverest, or the stupidest, or the richest, or the best born, but "the best,"--in a word, people about whom there is no question--such as the great Lady Fitz-Willis, that Patron Saint of Almack's, the great Lady Slowbore, the great Lady Grizzel Macbeth (she was Lady G. Glowry, daughter of Lord Grey of Glowry), and the like.It's a great little passage, but one that I don't quite get. Perhaps that society is too foriegn to me.
Now, I'm turning my attentions back to non-fiction, and am reading Collapse, a book about how societies are destroyed (by environmental issues, among other things). I also borrowed the same author's other famous work Guns, Germs, and Steel, which everyone I know has read and enjoyed. So I guess I should read it too.
Posted by ahyatt at February 7, 2005 12:14 PM