A friend just recommended Peregrine Pickle to me—I do like cynical, bawdy 18th-century humor. But this book is nearly 800 pages long! Anyone read it—or any other Tobias Smollet—and can give me the lowdown on whether it’s worth the investment in time (and the uneven shoulder from schlepping it to work in my briefcase)?
P.S. I just opened it to the Introduction, which begins, “Peregrine Pickle, Tobias Smollett’s sceond novel, has never been as popular as his first, Roderick Random, or his last, Humphrey Clinker.” Way to sell the product, Oxford English Novels! Why not just come out and say, “The book you are holding smells on ice!”
You are making all of this up aren’t you Eve.
Peregrine Pickle, yeah right.
"You take one down and pass it around,
784 pages of Peregrine Pickle,"
man, this could take a while
:::d&r:::
c
Nope. It’s in the public domain and you can read it on-line
(Whatever did we do before the internet?)
Fenris
Well, what novel could stand up to comparisons with Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker?
I read it in my youth. It’s good entertaining lowbrow stuff, full of chamber-pot humour and what have you, HOWEVER there is a long boring section in the middle that you can safely skip. That will bring the book down to a more manageable 400 pages or so.
IIRC, that middle section was the most popular part of the book when it was first published, because it is basically just gossip about a real person whose identity is thinly disguised in the text. It’s boring now for the same reason. It has almost nothing to do with the main story, so you can just skip it.
I read it in my youth. It’s good entertaining lowbrow stuff, full of chamber-pot humour and what have you, HOWEVER there is a long boring section in the middle that you can safely skip. That will bring the book down to a more manageable 400 pages or so.
IIRC, that middle section was the most popular part of the book when it was first published, because it is basically just gossip about a real person whose identity is thinly disguised in the text. It’s boring now for the same reason. It has almost nothing to do with the main story, so you can just skip it.
Heh. Heh heh.
Where else but the SDMB could you find a thread like this?
