Socks, two at a time
I temporarily lost my blogging mojo last week, what with the heat and all. And trying to slog through George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
That book is no laugh a minute. Actually it has this problem that many multi-plot novels have, I think, which is that the reader tends to only be interested in a couple of the plotlines, and frustrated by the others. For those of you who have read Middlemarch, I am halfway through and interested in the Garth storyline. Very Old-Fashioned Girl. Plotlines I am not interested include any discussion of politics. BORING. Also, I think that Celia, the catty sister of Dorothea, could do with many more scenes. (She definitely has some of the best lines in the book.) This is a book that might be improved by watching a BBC version of it instead of reading it. Oh well, I will conquer you Middlemarch.
On the topic of other long-winded things, we went to see Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution at Lincoln Center last week. I thought Adam would like it because his favorite movie is Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, which my grandmother accurately described as “a lot of walking, not a lot of talking.” I wanted to see it because I heard the clothes in it were quite stylish (it was set in ’40s Shanghai), and it was set in a similar time period (well, “the past,” I guess–ITMFL is a bit later, probably the ’60s) and place as In the Mood for Love. (Also, both star Tony Leung.) I thought Lust, Caution was okay, but it was very very long, and at a certain point, I was like, oh my god, hours have passed, and the main character is still in Hong Kong! This movie is never going to end!!!! To quote Elaine in Seinfeld, “Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert and just die already! Die!” Adam liked it even less than I did and claimed it was “boring.” And that is the end of my art-house movie reviews for the week.
Okay knitting-wise: My sweater has reached a stalled point because I know I need to rip out part of one sleeve and reknit so it isn’t so oddly shaped, but this has totally cramped my enthusiasm for it. Meanwhile, I seem to have lost many DPNs, and thus am knitting my latest pair of socks on one needle. (See above.)
August 12th, 2009 at 7:37 pm #Mary Ann Evans
Middlemarch is definitely her most challenging book; it’s not quite boring enough to give up on, but not quite interesting enough to devour either. So you end up stretching it out over two or three months. Not all her books are that sprawling; Adam Bede, her first published novel, is actually quite compact, and The Mill on the Floss is pretty long but also tightly focused on one family. Keep away from Daniel Deronda, though. That one rambles more than most, and she indulges much too freely her penchant for long, involuted sentences. One that I decided to count was more than 250 words, and I doubt it was the longest in the book.
August 13th, 2009 at 7:59 pm #Claire
I have read Mill on the Floss, and have almost no memory of it, but did remember it wasn’t too bad to get through, but clearly, it was more interesting than Middlemarch. Middlemarch is VERY slow. Good news though, Causbon finally died in the chapter I read this morning. Yay.
August 15th, 2009 at 7:43 pm #F. R. Leavis
It actually picks up (a bit) from here on. The logic of the plot unfortunately demanded that George had to put the most boring part, with the two dreariest characters, first.
August 17th, 2009 at 11:10 pm #John Waters
With my glasses off, the picture of the socks looks like a pair of flamingos.