Vanity Fair

[altariel]

Thank you everyone who recommended Vanity Fair on my Big Read Poll: I finished it this morning over breakfast and thought it was an absolute hoot. You are all very wise, o my flisters.

Comments

[tyellas.livejournal.com]

Yay! I re-read it myself after our discussion. Can't...help...rooting...for...Becky....

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I am very soft-hearted and spent the book rooting for Dobbin. And Lady Jane! I think everyone is victorious in the end (except poor Jos, of course)?

[the-wild-iris.livejournal.com]

Vanity Fair's one of the books I've been put off reading through sheer enormousness. I don't think it helps that I've got the old Wordsworth Classics edition, which looks like a gray brick.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I have been put off by its sheer enormousness too (600 pages?!). Also my copy (a Marshall Cavendish partworks el cheapo hardback) has teeny tiny print, about which I have become unforgiving in recent years.

However, it turned out to have short chapters and a cracking pace. I flagged for a while around p. 220-270 (I HAVE BEEN READING THIS FOR SO LONG NOW...) but then pushed on through to the end rapidly once I got to the midway point.

It is very, very funny: reminded me of Evelyn Waugh, only with gloriously overblown octopus-like sentences that wrap eight legs around you and then smack a huge kiss of a punchline on your forehead.

[trixieleitz]

It does rather put one in mind of a witty and attractive breeze block :)

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

:) I first read it in my first year at Uni, it's one of the ones I then kept to reread...

People think classic=dull, but there's a reason they became classic, after all.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

And now I have three different TV adaptations to compare and contrast!

[trixieleitz]

I did acquire myself a copy after reading that discussion, but I haven't read it yet. Looking forward to it, though :)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Enjoy!

[applegnat.livejournal.com]

o.o. Look what I found on Wikipedia about his folks:

Anne Becher (1792–1864) was the second daughter of Harriet and John Harman Becher, also a writer for the East India Company. They sent Anne abroad in 1809, telling her that the man she loved, Henry Carmichael-Smyth, had died. This was not true, but her family wanted a better marriage for her than with Carmichael-Smyth, a military man. She married Richmond Thackeray on 13 October 1810. The truth was unexpectedly revealed in 1812, when Richmond Thackeray unwittingly invited to dinner the supposedly dead Carmichael-Smyth. After Richmond's death, Henry Carmichael-Smyth married Anne in 1818 and they returned to England the next year.

My mind is blown! Anyway, yay on your liking the book; must dig it out again.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

!!!

[uitlander]

Hurrah! Another convert to the wonderful world of Becky Sharp.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Thank you for successful arguments in favour of reading it!

(BTW, in the interval of the Who Prom on Radio 3, Justina Robson did a piece about what Who meant to her. You can hear it on listen again tucked on the end of the first half, and then picked up again at the start of the second half - they miss a couple of minutes that way, annoyingly, but the bulk of her broadcast is there. Thought you might enjoy it, and might have missed it, given you were at the actual event.)

[uitlander]

I listened to it yesterday. It was a tad at odds with the mood of the prom, although I was particularly taken with the description of Colin Baker's doctor as "Basil Fotherington-Thomas channelling Margaret Thatcher whilst wearing Coco the clown's outfit".

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

I am far too fond of Becky Sharp, although Dobbin is the 19th-century equivalent of what would be called an adorable woobie in modern fangirl parlance.

(Philip Glenister is very good in that role in the 1998 BBC mini-series; there's even an excellent fanvid for his character in that screen adaptation somewhere out there.)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I cheered when he finally told Emmy where to get off. (Although I think Thackeray fiddled a bit to make her character suddenly appear more tyrannical than she had so far. I mean, it was totally plausible, I just felt he did it very suddenly, in order to be able to justify Dobbin's imminent walk out.)

I have the first CD of a late 60s adaptation of Vanity Fair, and I intend to work through the 1980s one up to the 1990s one.

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

I have got the theory that Amelia is as much a "monster" as Becky is, only as the epitome of passive-aggressive Victorian womanhood.

Enjoy the various screen versions!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I think that's a good description: they're both deeply self-centred, but it manifests in vastly different ways.