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[blahflowers]

Further to what I said yesterday, I'm at page 209 of Northanger Abbey and there's actually now clear plots and stuff. So if the first 125 pages of volume one had been condensed down, say to about 40 pages, then this novel would have been around 120 pages in total and so much better for it.

It's taken me so long to read this book my 'to read' shelf has almost burst it's banks:
Next up will be The Fountain at the Centre of the World by Robert Newman, which was a bookcrossing book I found in the library (Bookcrossing being something I don't have much time for as a) I find it very difficult to give my books away and b) There's a bit of an element of one-upmanship about the whole thing, "I put book x into the middle of a partical accelerator, if you get it you'll have to avoid the neutrinos speeding round there at close to the speed of light", "Well I put book y just within the event horizon of a black hole!"),
then Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man by Hardy and Clarke which might be the one book I read this month worse than NA,
then Pickwick Papers, another book group book, it's been ages since I read any Dickens and I'm not crazy about him either.

Comments

[notbbcnews24.livejournal.com]

On the plus side, Pickwickpapers is possibly Dickens least worst book... It's meandering aimlessness somehow works in contrast to his later works that merely seem overly long and needlessly convoluted. (see also his habit for giving multiple characters the same name/or giving one character multiple identites - this reaches a particular nadir in Our Mutual Friend...)