Reading Wednesday

Cecilia, by France Burney: This has been my primary reading occupation since I began it mid-February, as sometimes happens when I sink into a long 18thC work: they move so slowly that I need to spend all my time on them to get anywhere. I've been gradually falling in love with Burney as an author who I can't believe isn't more widely read: Cecilia, as a character, is completely unlike Evelina, the protagonist of the other Burney novel I've read (titled Evelina), but Cecilia is equally fascinating and endearing to me.

(Incidentally -- I really like how the convention of naming books after their heroines imbues the book itself with something like personhood: one can talk about 'spending a nice afternoon with Cecilia' and it really does feel like, by picking up such a large book focused on just one person, one is spending time with the narrative person of Cecilia.)

The premise of Cecilia is unusual: Cecilia is an independently wealthy heiress (whose virtue is, naturally, matched only by her beauty) whose only problem on the marriage market is that her husband must take her last name or her wealthy estate will pass to the next person in line for it. The first half of the book takes us through a range of interesting suitors, but actually settles on a clear favourite roughly halfway through, and from there the plot is concerned with the difficulties of getting their marriage sorted out to everyone's satisfaction.

I'd highly recommend this novel to someone with the patience for a long 18thC work -- I think it demonstrates the satisfactions and strengths of this literary tradition really well! Also, I'd love to be able to talk about it with someone; maybe I can write a more spoilery post in the future.

Puttering along: I always have a few books that I'm making my way through a page or two at a time; these are The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (up to p 133) and La Nouvelle Heloise, vol 1, which I am reading in French a few sentences at a time (up to p 49).

On the horizon: The downside of having a Good 18thC Novel on the go is that I make it through fewer distinct titles than when I'm reading more voraciously; I have a long backlog of things that I want to get to. For pleasure I'd like to do the next Lord Peter Wimsey or the next Jeeves & Wooster, but I think actually I will try to dive into some books I've hastily checked out on Japan. After spending the last several years agreeing with a friend of mine (who used to teach English in Japan) that we should go visit together some time when there was a deal on plane tickets, I have surprised myself by actually buying some extremely cheap tickets to Osaka, and we will be in Japan in April! So I don't have much time to orient myself to the country before we are there -- I'd like to have more knowledge than a teenage fondness for manga has provided me.