The 75 book challenge is going more slowly than I anticipated in part because the last few months have been frantically busy with promotion for The May Queen, trips to L.A. for my day job, and most recently a last-minute trip to visit family in Austin (a wealth of material that is begging to be put to paper). Enough with the excuses, but I'll keep my update short. Julian Barnes' England, England (#12) was similar to the campy Las Vegas version of England dreamt up in the novel. It's enticing, clever, ironic, and amusing but, in keeping with the theme, the characters--probably intentionally--lack substance. In the end it made it difficult for me to care about what happened to them.
Balzac's The Wrong Side of Paris (#13) on the other hand, though heavy on religion, was resplendent with character depth, passion, and a Hegel dialectic moral debate all wrapped up beautifully in a romantic post-revolutionary plot reminiscent of The Scarlet Pimpernel and with, as the cover raves, "melodrama akin to The Count of Monte Cristo." Melodrama aside, I found the main character Godefroid's search for meaning in a desperate world powerfully relevant.
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