Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
I liked Henry Fielding's Tom Jones........and Miguel Cervantes Don Quixote.........so I don't quite know why I can't get into these other classics.
I hate parting with books too......although I have given quite a few away(most of my text books have now been passed on).
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"Tom Jones" ... apart from "Pamela", maybe ... was the first great mega hit. Today they would be marketing t-shirts and stuff ... and the movie rights
... so, it's not a surprise that you would like it. It has that time-transcending quality. The first printing run was 10,000 copies! And there are some fascinating textual problems which arose from the high demand. (However, I doubt there is the same demand for a discourse on them
). The reason you can't get into the "other classics" is because they were not written for someone living in the twenty-first century. It's not that you are a philistine (altho' Matthew Arnold might disagree), it's that the works are inaccessible, fit only for pedants and students.