books

my failure with the nineteenth century novel

By on Monday, March 17, 2014

I am trying again. Someone I knew told me that Little Women was worth my time. And now that I have a kobo and Project Gutenberg is at my fingertips, I have no excuse not to read it. My kobo helpfully tells me I am 42% of the way through Little Women, yet it feels like I will never ever finish this book. I will, of course, just due to stubbornness and the belief that I should give classics a fair shot, but I have come to the conclusion that my three degrees in Mathematics have not properly trained me for reading what is supposed to be the apex-time of the novel. I just don’t know how I’m supposed to read these books and enjoy them.

Of course, that last sentence was probably an over-exaggeration. I thought and thought and thought and have come up with all the nineteenth century novels I have read in my life. There is a skewing towards Russian novels, since I took a course on The Great Russian Novel, and maybe I like Russian novels better because they have that weary annoyance with being alive that I somewhat identify with (the bits of Ukrainian in me peaking out).

So, here, to the best of my memory, is my list of nineteenth century novels I have read, roughly in the order I read them in:

1.

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells: Read in middle school. Don’t remember much other than I got my copy for 25 cents at a book sale.
2.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: Same book sale. Same price. Read the same November. It’s great that my memory recalls I read this in November of my eighth grade year, yet I remember very little about actually reading either of these two books. That much of an impression was left. I mean, I know the story of A Christmas Carol, having seen movies and the like, but there’s nothing specific about the book that remains.
3.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo: Okay – I read an abridged version of this in translation. It was still four hundred pages long and I was twelve, so that’s got to count for something. I read most of it outside on the grass while waiting for my sister’s gymnastic classes to finish. There was a pool there to dip my feet into. It was a rather lonely summer. I think I remember a lot of this, shortened, book though. I should read a full version and see how much I actually do remember.
4.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: I remember being more impressed that I could understand the bits of French in the novel. Book was okay I guess. Didn’t really understand the allure of Mr. Rochester.
5.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: I read like a third of this in Grade Ten English. By I read, I should say The class read. My teacher was very much about a Dickensian surgical strike saying we didn’t have the time to read all of A Tale of Two Cities, only the points most salient to the plot with the lookalikes and I guess something about knitting?
6.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Read for OAC English. I got a bad mark (probably a B or something; I was that sort of student that thought anything less that A+ was a bad mark) on an opinion piece because I said I didn’t really understand exactly what Kurtz did wrong? He got chummy with the natives and that seemed to shock everyone’s Victorian sensibilities, but other than that? Apparently to a high school English teacher, that kinda denotes complete lack of understanding because, and I remember this clearly, written at the top of my page in purple ink was You need to re-read this book because you have missed the point. I guess this also just sneaks in as well, being published in 1899.
7.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins: This was the book that told me that maybe nineteenth century novels and I were not to be. I liked it until near the ending when the (highlight to see spoiler) spooky secret society as the real villains. In true nineties (1990s that is) style: gag me with a spoon. This book is forever entwined with the summer I worked at Nortel and reading it on the long, round-about bus ride from Nortel Carling to Barrhaven. Three buses and an hour. Driving from my parents’ house to Nortel Carling takes ten minutes. This was not OC Transpo’s finest hour.
8., 9.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll: Okay, these books I actually like a fair deal. All the silly nonsense. But I don’t really know if they can be considered having the same weightiness as say Dickens or Doestoevsky.

10.

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper: I do not remember anything about this book. Daniel Day-Lewis was in the movie though. I saw the movie on a plane. Come to think of it, I think the person who talked to me about Little Women also likes either this book or this movie.

11.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Read on the bench of the Barrhaven Mall while waiting for my piano lessons with Tom Pechloff to begin. Again, not much stuck.

12.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol: Ah, now we are getting into my ancestral compatriots! But firstly, how sad is it that this Dead Souls is fourth on the list when you search for Dead Souls on Librarything? Ian Rankin’s Dead Souls is number one. Really? This makes me make that grrrrr sound I make when I’m frustrated with something over which I have no control whatsoever (frequently heard on airplanes or with family members).

Anyways, I like this book. I really like this book. It’s so bizarre and Gogol went mad and starved himself to death while trying to finish the trilogy and something inside me emo-nods and says I totally relate to that.
13.

Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov: This Russian novel I do not like so much. I fell asleep while reading this book, in a cold room, in the middle of the day.
14.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev: A Russian novel I don’t remember much about. I’m guessing there’s a father and a son. I think they go to England?
15.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: I remember the ending of The Idiot, but I think what I think is the beginning of The Idiot is actually the beginning of Demons, which I was reading at the same time but didn’t finish.
16.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoi: A wonderful story, unfortunately interjected with Tolstoi spew.
17.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Well, this is just the greatest novel ever written. You can’t really say anything other than that. I spent all of May 2002 reading this book and pretty much doing nothing else, ignoring my stupid computer science course I had to take in order to get my undergraduate pure math degree. I learned a lot more from this book than I ever did about Java.
18.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi: Any long-time follower of my blog already knows my views on War and Peace (specifically, Tolstoi spew). I surprised myself my enjoying the war parts more than the peace parts, in prime contradiction to Anastasia Krupnik’s mom in one of the Anastasia books, but I can’t remember which one.

19.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Another failure. Sorry Rebecca who loves this book. I feel bad I don’t love it too. This was the first book I read on my kobo, so we’ll always have that.
20.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: I liked this one! Yay for me! But this book isn’t actually about the nineteenth century, so maybe that’s why I liked it. It’s about the 1640s.
21.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: Not done this yet, but not loving it either. I have a feeling this makes me heartless.

I think that’s it (although I’ll probably hit publish and remember like twenty other nineteenth century books I’ve read). So what’s the total? Let’s see:

So, is that an acceptable attempt at the nineteenth century novel? A poor one? English-lit geeks, help me out.

I want to enjoy classics, but then I try and get frustrated and my brain rebels. Perhaps I need to be older and calmer and less angry with things. Perhaps I need to mellow out to enjoy stories that aren’t post-modern and stories where marriage and riches are the ultimate goal. Comedies of manners. I don’t know. I give myself pep talks but I just can’t get excited about nineteenth century novels the way I get excited about contemporary ones.

So what nineteenth century novel should I read next that will cause me to fall in love with the whole genre? Internet, please advise me.

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