Chose a long serious(?) book after all the Håkan Nessers, although it is hard work to read a book this long when not on holiday.
Did I enjoy it? Well, partly, or up to a point. Thackeray is very verbose and whilst the book is full of wit it is also full of longeurs.
The main characters are Becky Sharp and her rakish husband Crawley and Amelia Sedley, who marries the equally rakish George Osborne (?) who doesn’t survive long, dying at Waterloo, aided and abetted by William Dobbin.
Apart from Dobbin, they are all in different ways and at different times impecunious scroungers, particularly of course Becky who will flirt with any man with money and descends close to whoredom, or perhaps she does; Thackeray is too decorous to do more than hint, and I am sure the import of many of his hints are not picked up by a 21st century reader.
The copy I read is my Dad’s from 1933 – wow.
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