2013年12月15日日曜日

A Tale of Two Cities readalong - part 2!

So to be honest I struggled to get through this weeks bit. Happily it wasn't because of the story, but because I had a cold, ended up working late most nights (always fun when you're not feeling well!), and didn't have the time or the concentration to read when I got home. I did manage to finish off the remaining chapters this afternoon though, so I'm all caught up! Huzzah!

And as with the last post, for anyone who hasn't read the book, this post is pretty spoiler heavy so be warned!

I find myself really not being that bothered about anything to do with Lucie (also I find the spelling of that to be irritating), as she is still such a non-entity of a character. She's just there to worry about all of the men in her life, and be perfect, it seems. Boring. Also I don't know if it's just me being dense, but in the chapter where it's talking about her having children, I spent the whole time until it was specifically stated that the children existed going "Oh, has she had kids then? Is this like her seeing into her own future? Is it some huge kind of metaphor for something that I'm too stupid to get?! What?!". I think that someone should go through the books and add a little explanatory sentence for me at the side of some of the passages saying "Yes, this means that he is dead", "This is the guy they were talking about a few chapters ago", or "The children are real!!!". Hehe. I'm sure I used to have good reading comprehension skills at some point. Sigh!

I find the Sidney storyline quite interesting.. I can't quite see where it's going now, but presumably he is going to play a really important role in the last part of the book.. you don't bring in a morally corrupt man who says that he doesn't have the ability to do good without letting him do something good at some point!

I am also glad that I completely get the design of the cover of my book now! Knitting is useful! Although hearing about that really made me want to see how exactly things were being encoded into the knitting, which I'm sure is not something that most people reading would care about, hehe.

I'm really hoping I'll be able to find more time to read this week, although it doesn't seem tremendously likely at the moment. I want to know what happens next, but seeing as the first few chapters for this week didn't even touch on the major event that happened at the end of last week's section, I'm guessing Dickens might make me wait a while for it. *Shakes fist at the past*

6 件のコメント:

  1. I only finished last week's bit yesterday and still haven't had time to write my post (terrible readalong host!) so I completely sympathise! I also totally agree about Lucie, both her boringness and the spelling of her name, and I had a bit of a double take with the bit about the child who dies. It was a bit difficult to tell if he'd ever existed or was just in everyone's heads.

    I did have to stop reading it right before going to bed though when they were being all stabby and murdery and such, but the knitting is great :-) I am finding it intensely irritating how people keep doing things that are clearly a stupid idea while saying 'but nothing bad will possibly happen to me' as well. CLEARLY bad stuff will happen immediately.

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    1. I'm glad I wasn't the only one!

      Yay knitting! I always assume that anybody who says that everything will be okay is going to end up having everything go horribly wrong now.. I kind of wish I could go back to when I was younger and actually be shocked when things take a turn for the worse, hehe.

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  2. I'd completely forgotten about the child that died but that nobody seemed too traumatised by!

    I finished the book yesterday and Book 3 is brilliant. I've kind of been writing about it everywhere but the ending is fantastic and the writing just becomes so much easier to follow. Plus, there's less Lucie but more Dr Manette, Mr Lorry and Carton and much more of the Defarges and the French Revolution.

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    1. I really don't particularly get why that was in there... maybe it forms part of some important plot part in the next bit (which, um, I haven't even started reading yet, hehe). Don't tell me though!

      I'm glad to hear that there's less Lucie but more of all of the people I actually find interesting. Although it makes me sad to not care that much about one of the few female characters! I shall look forward to reading it tomorrow if I actually manage to find some time to sit down and read!

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  3. I still haven't finished Book 2 and I'm actually seriously considering setting it aside for another time (not a decision I take lightly!). I'm really struggling with it and I'm not sure why. I think it just doesn't have that certain something to bring me back to it page after page. I'm assuming it's going to get good and bad stuff is bound to happen but I'm not sure I want to stick around to find out.

    Having said that, I do love Madame Defarge and her knitting...I didn't know why there was knitting on my cover either!

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    1. I've been reading it for long stretches at a time, which means that I don't need to have as much motivation to go back (if that makes sense?)... I don't know how you were reading it, but I think it would be an annoying book to read just a chapter and put down, because depending on the chapter lots of stuff can be happening, or it can all be about something that isn't all that interesting in itself.

      I'm all for putting books aside if you're not feeling that into them. It's better to do that than to do what I used to do which was say that I'm still reading something, but just not reading anything for months at a time because I felt too guilty about starting new stuff when I still had things that I was part way through. I've realised recently that there isn't enough time to bother doing that though. I've also realised that reading lots of books at the same time is fun! Hehe.

      I have to say it might have been the knitting that swayed me over to joining the readalong, as I wasn't sure about reading Dickens at all, but I wanted an excuse to start buying pretty books and I figured that if the book has knitting in it can't be that bad! Hehe.

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