Here's Laura's summary of last night's reading group:

We had a somewhat smaller turnout than tonight than we've had for the last few meetings - nine people - but another good, vigorous discussion (despite the fact that only four people had actually finished the book). Everyone in the group agreed that they liked the book, to one degree or another, which made it all the more surprising that we still had an enthusiastic and fairly long discussion (usually disagreement add a little extra "juice" to our discussions). We talked about several of the characters (primarily the two leading women, Becky and Amelia), the unusual narrative style, and the historical setting of the novel. We also talked about Thackery's own "historical setting," including his rivalry with his contemporary, Charles Dickens, which led us to compare the styles of those two authors. There was some agreement that the book, as a novel, rather than as the serialized story that it was originally, might be a bit longer than it needed to be.

My own two cents: I was actually kind of surprised that everyone pretty much liked the book, although those who hadn't finished it didn't feel compelled to do so. Sometimes with long books turnout is lower not because people didn't read it, but because they got into it but couldn't finish it in time, and don't want to have revealed what happens next by attending. I've done that myself more than once. What's interesting about Vanity Fair is that most of the characters are fairly unsympathetic, yet you still feel compelled to read about them, as they seem to have turns at both good and bad behavior in various unpredictable ways. The two main female characters, Amelia and Becky, start out the book basically socially equal, then each goes through various highs and lows within society, until at the end, they're both more or less equal again. Although this was meant to be read in installments, and from what I can tell wasn't meticulously plotted out beforehand, it does seem to have a cohesive narrative structure about it. Unlike Dickens, who pads his novels with countless subplots and conjuring up of eccentric throwaway characters, Thackeray shows more restraint and instead pads his installments with more commentary on the background or the action that has just transpired. This makes reading the book in one go more of a slog, as the narrator tends to wander quite a bit sometimes, but he does manage to pull it all together in fairly short order. It certainly could have been shorter, but I was never completely bored with the book.



Next month is Ivanhoe, which if I really get ambitious I could work in between Hugo nominees, but I need to get a couple dispatched first and see how much time is left. So far Bones of the Earth is a quick read. In fact it almost feels unnatural to just read page after page without constantly flipping to the back to read the footnotes (there were 70 pages of them in the OUP edition of Vanity Fair).