Book Chain, weeks 23 & 24

[pedanther]

#25: Read a book that was acquired or added to the TBR before the previous book.

A tricky one, since the previous book had been languishing unread on my shelves long enough that I don't have a record of when I acquired it. I read a couple of books for other challenges while I thought it over, and in the end I went with A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens; I'm not entirely sure that I've owned this specific copy since my youth, but in any case I've been meaning to read it since then.

A classic, which meant that I went in knowing the famous quote at the beginning and the famous quote at the end and almost nothing of what happens in between. I enjoyed Dickens's narrative voice and many of the characters, but felt that some of the bits that were probably supposed to be most dramatic didn't really land for me.

(I was inevitably reminded of the Doctor Who episode that includes a homage to the ending of the novel, but not just for that scene: the same episode includes a notoriously clunky bit of dialogue in which someone is described as being "as truthful, honest, and about as boring as they come", a description which might also serve for the central character of the novel, who is honest and upright and mostly serves as a catalyst for the actions of more interesting characters without becoming interesting himself.)


#26: If the previous book had an odd number of pages, read a book with an even number of pages, or vice versa.

I wasn't entirely sure if my copy of A Tale of Two Cities counted as having an odd number of pages: it did if you go by the last numbered page, but not if you ignore the scholarly appendices and went by the last page of the main text. I decided to cover my bases by picking a book which also had scholarly appendices and worked as a counterpart either way.

So now I'm reading Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler, a non-fiction account of the rise and fall of Constantinople interwoven with a visit to present-day Istanbul. It's not quite gripping me yet, but I'm enjoying filling in the gaps between the bits of Constantinople's history that I knew before.

Comments

[igenlode]

I'm not sure Darnay (if that's who you are thinking of) is the central character of "A Tale of Two Cities" -- he doesn't really appear in it much. And none of the others really fit the description of 'honest and boring' (Lucie?)

Dickens would probably say "Oh, Paris is the central character!" or something like that :-p

[pedanther]

It was Darnay I was thinking of: he doesn't appear in it much (which is part of why I wasn't keen on him), and when he doesn't he's not very proactive apart from that one noble but foolish decision that sets up the last part of the story, but most of the plot is driven by people who either want something of him or are trying to help him. And when the plot isn't about him personally, it's usually about him as a proxy for his no-longer-available relatives.

[igenlode]

Very true; most of the plot strands do centre around the existence of Darnay and his family, one way or another. And he doesn't really do anything much *other* than exist :-)

(A McGuffin?)