I finally finished reading Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell...yesterday, I think? (This is what happens when nights are your days...you never know what day it is, really.)
Anyway. This book was a sporadic buy - my sister, our friend, and I had gone into a bookstore in order for me to purchase Stardust since we had just seen the movie (I really shouldn't have seen the movie before reading the book). While we were there my friend and I found two copies of this book on clearance (as in, a $30 seven hundred and eighty two page hardcover book marked down to under $7). It sounded vaguely fantasy-ish, and it was a bargain, so of course I bought it.
When I started reading it after finishing Stardust, my immediate reaction was to wonder why I had bought this book instead of getting it from the library. It is more than a little on the tedious side. But as I continued reading, I realized that for all of its tediousness, it is brilliant, as well as very, very British. It reminds me of Jane Austin (as far as the writing style and descriptions of social interactions) and Charles Dickens (as far as quirky, eccentric, very human characters)...except it contains lots of magic and a rather large quantity of footnotes (and is pseudo-historical to boot with appearances of historical figures such as Wellington and Lord Byron). Brilliant, I tell you, and worth buying.
View User's Journal
Salathielly's Commonplace Log
 |
