I did it. I finished Wilkie Collins's most excellent Armadale. Although I still think The Woman in White is my favorite, Armadale certainly ranks amongst the best of his novels in my opinion. I even like it a tad bit more than The Moonstone. If you like long, sweeping Victorian novels with a 'sensationalist' slant, definitely give this a try. There's quite a bit more to the novel than just the sensationalist aspect, but that's what hits you when you first read it. There's a lot that is also going on underneath the surface rather subtlety as well. Lydia Gwilt has to be one of the most interesting characters I've come across in a long time. I recently wrote about her in a post. The last 200 pages or so are pretty intense, reading from Lydia Gwilt's diary is a little draining, and I should probably have spaced those last chapters out. There's a certain point you reach in a really good novel where you don't want to put it down, but I was well beyond that point however. I now have No Name (another long, sweeping novel), The Law and the Lady and Basil to look forward to. I think Collins actually wrote quite a lot of novels, but I'm not sure quality-wise how some of his lesser known works compare. I'll make my way through the three unread novels that I already own, and then look for more. And of course he's definitely worthy of rereading.
I've set aside Goethe's Elective Affinities to read next. I haven't yet started it, though perhaps tonight I'll get to it. I thought something completely different was called for. The synopsis reads:
"Elective Affinities was written when Goethe was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. This is a new edition of his penetrating study of marriage and passion, bringing together four people in an inexorable manner. The novel asks whether we have free will or not and confronts its characters with the monstrous consequences of repressing what little "real life" they have in themselves, a life so far removed from their natural states that it appears to them as something terrible and destructive."
I'm really intrigued by the premise. This is the first work by Goethe I'll have read, so I'll have to read more about him. I know he was/is a very distinguished man of German Letters. It sounds as though he was writing during a pivotal time in history. I'm not at all familiar with the Romantic period in literature (other than the few things I've read by Mary Shelley), so I am happy to try something new.
I've set aside (temporarily) Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps in favor of Marjorie Eccles's The Shape of Sand. I'm too predictable. I set aside a fairly modern novel (20th century anyway) in favor of a historical mystery. These are library books, so I am limited to choosing from my pile, but I hope it is a reflection on the content of the McCarthy book rather than contemporary novels in general, which I never seem to choose these days. Why is it that a book set in any other time period than that in which I am living is more interesting (for me) to read? At least that is what I am always picking up--historical fiction. And I am not in any way saying that the McCarthy book is not good. It's very good, but I kept finding myself seeing how many pages I had left to read until I finished the story I was on. But maybe I'm just cranky in general with library books as the Eccles book has started out good, but I am a little confused with the characters. Hopefully things will sort themselves out. I will read the last three stories in the McCarthy book by the way. I also started Call of the Wild by Jack London. I discovered I couldn't renew it, and it is due back at the library at the end of the week. It is easy (I use the term loosely as reading about brutality to animals is never easy) reading. It is written from the dog's perspective, which is new to me. I am actually enjoying it far more than I thought I would. The book is fairly short, so I should be able to read it over the course of the week. Call of the Wild was written in 1903, so I guess I can call that a modern novel. Maybe I am not hopeless with modern fiction after all.