My last two reads have both been wonderful: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, the first in a series of mysteries1 about four retirees living in a fancy nursing home who study police cold cases and solve real-life murders.
Like with Middlemarch, it took me some months to get through Jane Eyre, the Penguin Classics edition of which runs 489 footnoted pages. And I did enjoy reading the footnotes, which provided definitions or literary references I would never have understood/gotten otherwise.
Both books, though different in many respects, were strong on characterization. Jane was a principled, resilient, and charismatic girl/woman to root for. And the four main characters in TTMC were all believable as real people. As the series progresses2 and the bodies start piling up, believability will inevitably become harder to buy into, but whatever happens in the remaining novels in the series, I’m going to enjoy spending more time with Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron.
JE wasn't as difficult a read as Middlemarch, but it wasn't easy either. Brontë can give Mary Ann Evans Cross a run for her money when it comes to complex sentences. Here's one from page 133: "I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement: the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house — from the grey hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me — to that sky expanded before me, — a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight-dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance: and for those trembling stars that followed her course, they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them." That sentence is punctuated by eight commas, six semicolons, three em dashes, and two colons.
On Saturday, Tony and I watched the film adaptation of TTMC on Netflix. If we hadn't already enjoyed the book so much, we might have reacted more kindly to the movie, which wasn't bad but paled in comparison. A number of characters were left out or minimized, and the plot was truncated a good deal. The motive for one of the murders was changed, though the perpetrator remained the same. I think it would have been better as a TV series to allow for more or all of the twists and turns to play out.
1The fifth novel in the TMC series, The Impossible Fortune, comes out at the end of the month.
2Tony currently has The Last Devil to Die, the fourth book in the series, checked out from our local library.