{"id":364,"date":"2003-06-18T15:51:18","date_gmt":"2003-06-18T20:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2003\/06\/18\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-20T20:56:40","modified_gmt":"2005-10-21T00:56:40","slug":"thackeray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2003\/06\/18\/thackeray\/","title":{"rendered":"Thackeray"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My accomplishments this summer so far have been few. But one thing I did manage to do, which I’d been intending to do for a very very long time, was to read Vanity Fair. No, not the magazine, the book.<\/p>\n

The book, which was written in the mid 19th century, is referenced so often in other books I’ve read, that I felt like it was a necessity for me to read it and thus understand better the source of all these side comments. During the winter I even got so far as to read the first chapter standing in Barnes and Noble in Burlington. And it was good! Jane Austen and a few others aside, most of the stuff I’ve read from the 19th century has been from the late Victoria era, and it’s almost all been aimed at children. There were standards and plotlines which had to be obeyed. The wicked were punished, the good were rewarded, and the saintly died. This isn’t to say that there weren’t variations on this theme; there were, of course, but it was all still very Suitable for a Young Audience. So when you contrast Becky Sharp flinging the dictionary out of her carriage window and plotting her social ascent with the March sisters, all very pious and patient in their poverty, it’s quite a shocking difference.<\/p>\n

This is, of course, a novel intended for the adult audience, whose tastes are naturally(?) more sophisticated than their children. Or so they’d like to think.<\/p>\n

After reading that first chapter, I didn’t actually buy it until after we’d moved.<\/p>\n

In any case, it was good. Parts of it were better than that. There were a few lines where, reading them with a modern take on vocabulary, I had to wonder if they would have had the same connotation as they do now. (The interesting thing is that the modern connotation fit the scene.) Because if they did! I found it a much faster read than Middlemarch, which really dragged for me. The characters were more interesting — they did<\/i> things rather than sit around and angst about them.<\/p>\n

Now I have a couple days to finish rereading the rest of the HP series before book 5 comes out.<\/p>\n

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My accomplishments this summer so far have been few. But one thing I did manage to do, which I’d been intending to do for a very very long time, was to read Vanity Fair. No, not the magazine, the book. The book, which was written in the mid 19th century, is referenced so often in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}