A List: Hardy--Return of the Native...…………………………….494/507
B List: Anna Sewell--Black Beauty...………………………………84/315
C List: Scott--The Heart of Midlothian...………………………....457/508
I am slowly getting through those 19th century novels. I have read quite a lot of Hardy now, and while I usually find them worthwhile most of the later books (in the order of my reading them) I haven't read them as closely as they ultimately require, so superficially they start to resemble each other in my memory. Death always outweighs life in them, nature is a force that thwarts rather than complements civilization, the more vital the characters the more they are brought into confrontation with and crushed by these superior opposing forces to the human dream. It's not untrue, but it is not what I love best either.
The B list, as noted before, includes a good number of what are thought of as classic children's books, one or two a volume. The other ones I have had come up so far, Bambi, Andersen's fairy tales, and of course the Alice books, had a lot in them that could be of interest to adults, or at least to me. This is the first one that really is almost exclusively a book for children. It is not uncharming--I would like to read it to my daughters, aged 8 and 4, after I get through with it--and having been published in England one year prior to the publication of The Return of the Native, it certainly provides a sunny contrast with the doomed characters who inhabit that novel.
After starting on this list in the fall of 2013, I was able to finish the books from Volume I of my encyclopedia by the end of 2015, and those from Volume II by the end of 2017. My pace has dropped off a little as my life has grown increasingly busy, and I am not going to get through all of the titles from Volume III by the end of this year. There are not too many left to get through, but at least one of them is quite long, so it may take me until the spring to move on to Vol. IV. Even at the two years per volume pace I was on schedule to finish when I was 83 so I'm going to have to make up/pick up some ground somewhere down the line.
This is about the fourth month I have been working on the Scott. I do like him, which is why I haven't given up on the book, since the C-list pile-in-waiting has grown to 7 or 8 books. It is dense and requires a lot of concentration, and this is the list of books I am supposed to be able to read quickly and breezily, which my competition has not been giving me lately. I was thinking I would have enjoyed (savored?) Scott more if I had taken him up at a more leisurely period in my life, but I think he would have been too difficult for me as a teenager, and in my 20s the influence of the St John's experience, which didn't substantially begin to relax until I was past 35 at least, would probably have prejudiced me against being able to appreciate his most admirable qualities.
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