now, tastes more like real life

Yesterday, while riding the exercise bike, I finished Jude the Obscure. Finally. I had been reading it steadily for two months with no other books in the meantime (what would Sara Nelson say about that?). But I was determined not to put it aside because I knew if I did I was screwed, I'd never finish it.

I'm glad I did. I was shocked at how much actually happened in the book. Plus, it's kind of scandalous (and Wikipedia just taught me that it was nicknamed Jude the Obscene). Reading big tomes like this (although it's not as tomey as it could be) makes me want to be back as an English major so I can analyze it. I really could spend forever just on Jude the Obscure, even though in some respects it's kind of soapy, in others its so interesting.

Here's one of my favorite bit from it - which is a spoiler, sort of, if you can spoil the endings of books originally written in 1895:

"It was in his nature to do it. The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live." (Part Sixth, Chapter 2)

!