Finished Anthony Trollope's novel The Eustace Diamonds this week, all eight hundred and something pages of it. It was divided into three volumes, but I'll be nice and shall only count it as one novel.
I really enjoyed this story - it was both dated and timeless all in one. First printed in 1873 by prolific, acclaimed novelist of his time Trollope (whom, as I must confess, I had never heard of until I saw him mentioned in Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel), it describes people as aptly as any contemporary piece - the only difference is the different morals and customs of the time that those people are bound to. I had opted for this Trollope novel because Smiley had mentioned that he doesn't let the reader like the protagonist, which I found intriguing. He speaks of Lizzie as a shallow, greedy, lying weasel, and lets lots of his characters opine on this too. Like Smiley, I came to greatly admire his writing, and couldn't wait to find out what would happen next in the great scandal of the family diamonds ... and I found the conclusion quite satisfying, and am looking forward to reading more Trollope in the near future.
However, since this large volume set me back a bit on my 52-books-in-52-weeks schedule, I picked up some easier reading next: Emily Giffin's Something Blue, a sort of sequel to her Something Borrowed, but it cleverly tells the next part of the story from the point of view of the protagonist's best friend ... or ex-best friend - they don't really feel so friendly after one falls in love with the other's fiancé.
Even though I inhaled it just as quickly as the other one (yes, already done!), I didn't like this quite as well as "Something Borrowed" - the voice didn't sound quite right, and I admit I resented the happy ending for this one. I didn't readily believe the redemption of the storyteller, and I certainly wasn't ready for everything to sew up so nicely. Nice idea, not bad for chick lit, but it left me wanting.
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