[ED: I wrote this on the train coming back from Newark in mid-October, and then promptly lost in in the annals of my computer. I've already finished the next book and have moved on to other pastures!]

Well, the first of October came and went, and you didn’t hear from me. “Oh well,” you think. “I guess classic literature and a liberal arts education are just incompatible these days.” Ba-dum chhk.

Don’t worry. I haven’t abandoned my project. And I’m coming back today to tell you (gleefully!) that A Tale of Two Cities was, indeed, finished. More than a month ago! (I’ve been in Scotland visiting The Boy, so things like blog posts were less than a priority for me.)

I will admit that I was surprised by how difficult I found the book in comparison to Anna Karenina. After finishing something so long, I expected to fly through Tale and that just wasn’t the case. The combination of having few “normal” weekends and starting both school and work hit me hard in the month of September. (I think I was on campus one weekend the whole month.) Since my traditional free-time for things like reading always falls on weekends…well, it was a challenge! As for the book itself… I can’t say that it was my favorite. (If it had been, I would have torn through it as fast as I tore through the Tolstoy.)

A large part of my motivation for reading the book was this: I didn’t like Dickens before. But I had never read an entire Dickens. I decided that I could only make a judgment such as “I don’t like Dickens” if I had… you know… really tried reading Dickens. This is a pretty common rationale for reading a book–I’ve heard a lot of people say, “Well, I wanted to have an informed dislike for this author…” In retrospect, this was largely setting old Charlie up for a failure and a totally misguided way of deciding to read a great novel. But at least I can now say that I’ve read it, I suppose, as if I were sticking it onto a wooden plaque and hanging it over my fireplace.

And, although this might make you apprehensive about my moral compass, I far and away liked Mme. Defarge the best. Not that I would want to go out drinking with her, of course. She’s just much more interesting to read about than Lucie (who is quite possibly the second most boring character ever created, after Pollyanna) or, really, any of the male characters for that matter.

I’ve already started my next book and will hopefully be able to get back on track and finish it by the end of October finished my next book. While most people probably wouldn’t call it a “great classic,” I picked up a copy of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene in Scotland and was hooked immediately. I’m justifying the scientific intrusion by reminding myself of the book’s widespread influence and legacy for popular science writing. (Or I could just be geeking out about genetics.)