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Mar. 2nd, 2022 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherI've finished reading Our Mutual Friend. With all the characters and subplots, it takes a while to get going, but the way everything pays off is very satisfying.
I was amused by the author's note at the end saying that he anticipated that many readers and commentators would consider John Rokesmith's backstory to be what modern audiences would call a spoiler, when in fact he'd put a lot of effort into hinting at it so that an alert reader could figure it out. He goes on to say that there's another strand of the plot that he did attempt "to keep for a long time unsuspected, yet always working itself out... and turning it to a pleasant and useful account at last"; he doesn't say which it is, though I have a couple of suppositions.
The reading challenge for March is "a book with a location in the title". I've used that as an impetus to finish off Sig: City of Blades finally, so I've got the rest of the month to my own devices. (It's not that I wasn't enjoying it, it's just that it wasn't a high priority so I kept putting it aside for other things.) I've also set myself a goal of reading one Philip Marlowe novel a month; this month's is The High Window, which will mean that next month, when the Buzzword challenge is "Little or Big", I can use The Little Sister to knock off two birds with one stone.
I was amused by the author's note at the end saying that he anticipated that many readers and commentators would consider John Rokesmith's backstory to be what modern audiences would call a spoiler, when in fact he'd put a lot of effort into hinting at it so that an alert reader could figure it out. He goes on to say that there's another strand of the plot that he did attempt "to keep for a long time unsuspected, yet always working itself out... and turning it to a pleasant and useful account at last"; he doesn't say which it is, though I have a couple of suppositions.
The reading challenge for March is "a book with a location in the title". I've used that as an impetus to finish off Sig: City of Blades finally, so I've got the rest of the month to my own devices. (It's not that I wasn't enjoying it, it's just that it wasn't a high priority so I kept putting it aside for other things.) I've also set myself a goal of reading one Philip Marlowe novel a month; this month's is The High Window, which will mean that next month, when the Buzzword challenge is "Little or Big", I can use The Little Sister to knock off two birds with one stone.
