A Little Light Reading
I’m not quite sure how I got here, but first, my friend Amy at New Century Reading said she was doing a Bleak House readalong, with each serial segment a week, just about 40 pages. Easy, I said, and was glad to pick it up again after I tried and failed at an earlier readalong this year.
Then, my husband says he wants to see Les Miserables on Christmas Day. I’ve never read it, I said. (except for an excerpt in high school French called Les Chandeliers de L’Evecque.) Why don’t we read it together? So we nerdishly compared translations and decided to go with the unabridged Fahnestock/Macafee in the mass market paperback.
The small type, the several typos, and the general sludginess of the prose all brought me down. I’ve switched to a much prettier edition translated by Denny, and we’ll see how it goes from here.
Also, somewhere in there, I decided to pick up volume 2 of Carla Speed McNeil’s excellent Finder Library, perhaps when I was waiting for the MMPB of Les Mis to arrive and after I’d read my weekly allotment of Bleak House.
Thus, in the middle of December, and holiday frenzy, I find myself in the middle of 2700+ pages. What was I thinking?
December 16th, 2012 at 3:22 pm
What indeed.
I can say that I loved by Bleak House and Les Miserables, though they do take a long time to read. Have fun. And if you don’t have fun, read something else instead.