Vanity Fair

There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing, and fiddling: there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the look-out, quacks, (other quacks, plague take them!) bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. Yes, this is VANITY FAIR: not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.

A lively and delicious read - rather like a practical and entertaining version of Machiavelli!

Moby Dick

I have decided that I need to make mid-way posts, because I will rarely update if I wait until I finish the book.

So, I am about 1/5 through Moby Dick. Despite what Jesse would have you believe, this book rocks! The only fair complaint that could be lobbied is that it is a bit slow. However, the narrator, Ishmael, is very clever and humorous, and it is very interesting to read about Nantucket and whaling.

Definitely a worthwhile read!

The Master and Margarita

A while ago I read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which is great. A wild caper in which the devil and his friends come to Moscow and wreak havoc. The protagonist, the Master, is thought by most to be largely autobiographical.

Bulgakov worked on the book from 1928 until his death in 1940. In 1930, after a campaign denouncing him as anti-Soviet, Bulgakov burnt the first manuscript. He later returned to the novel, although he did not live to see it published. The uncensored version of the novel was not published in the Soviet Union until 1973.

It is a fantastic work, and many quotes are famous in Russia even today (according to my Russian lit prof, Zhenya Bershtein). I highly recommend it!!