Book #62: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

I started this book back in JULY and just now finished it... in October. Sure, I moved across the county and had a baby in between the beginning and ending of the book, so I have been busy, but I've obviously had plenty of reading time based on all the other books I read--I just wasn't super motivated to get back to reading this book. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy it--I really liked this book every time I was reading it. The story is pretty engrossing and Thackeray's commentary is really hilarious if you pay attention. But it was just so LONG that I got discouraged every time I looked at how much I had left to read. The version I have is over 650 pages (too lazy to go look at how many exactly) and it just didn't feel like the quick summer reads I was preferring while vacationing all summer long. It's also hard because I've been reading in short half-hour bursts instead of getting long reading periods in, which I think would have made this book easier. But I kept looking at it sitting on my nightstand and feeling guilty for not finishing it, so I finally sat down with it this week and polished it off.

This book reminded me a lot of Dickens, which makes sense because Thackeray and Dickens were contemporaries (and competitors). They use a lot of the same conventions (like addressing the reader ("Oh, dear reader...")) and are writing about the same time period. But this book is making fun of the society that Dickens writes within, and pointing out the inconsistencies and insecurities that people have and that motivate them to act in his world of Vanity Fair. The full title of the book (as it was originally published), was Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, which, after you read it, makes total sense: all the characters in it are deeply flawed and problematic. Becky Sharp, the main character, is just the most open about it--she knows she's bad and she thrives on it. Other characters start out as being apparently good and respectable people but turn into sniveling wimps or obnoxious creeps over the course of the book. It seems like everyone gets worse from the beginning to the end (except for Becky's husband, who gets better and stops being such a gambler and tries to become an honest man), which makes it seem like Thackeray has a pretty negative view of the world. There's a good number of chapters in the middle that seem to drag to me (or probably any modern reader) where he's specifically making fun of his contemporary society and their parties and expectations and such. It's also interesting because the story covers a number of decades of time, but you forget that it does because Thackeray never says "Four years later..." or any indication of how much time has passed--you only figure it out because the children in the story get older and older, haha. You start out when Becky and Amelia are leaving school, and they're middle-aged women (or even older) by the end of the book. Overall, I enjoyed reading this portrayal of the time period--I think we all think it was all Pride and Prejudice back then (although that's set much earlier) and it's funny to read something completely different.