July Update

A List--Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean 125/481
B List--Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy 411/874
C List--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling 244/428

A good trio of books--I am finding Dreiser especially to be unexpectedly absorbing--though not delivering great variety in terms of genre, year of publication, fame/status solidly established in the old Anglo-American tradition. At least I have one woman author, and her book, while old and celebrated, is a departure from the kinds of books I normally read, though not in a politically challenging sort of way. The Yearling in fact takes place in the old, now almost unimaginable America where rural people truly lived pretty much on their own, with scant contact with government institutions and laws, including schools. Even I thought it was slow-going at first, and I still think it would be difficult for any young person without an unusually well-developed discipline for reading long books to make it beyond the first couple of chapters, but the story gathers a accumulative weight as it moves forward, though perhaps this is characteristic of all successful books that are primarily concerned with the natural (or the purely spiritual) over the human world.

I will do a long write-up about the Dreiser book here when I finish it, which will probably be around the time the next update is due.