TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (Thomas Hardy) - August 14/12

Hooray! I finally finished it! I started reading this months ago and have started and finished a bunch of other books in the meantime, just because I could only stand to read this thing for about 50 pages at a time. The story is fine, it's very melodramatic and modern, but Hardy bogs the narrative down with flowery language and a relentless series of descriptions of things I couldn't possibly care less about. Pages and pages devoted to different farm techniques and threshers and whatever else. Chop 200 or 300 pages out of this thing and you might have something. (It's worth noting, too, that he writes Tess' rape so subtly that I didn't even realize it had happened, and had to check Wikipedia to see what was going on.) ** out of ****