Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Mapp and Lucia by E. F. Benson

I gave this one the old 50-page try, (in fact, I read over 100 pages just to be sure) but alas, do not feel like picking it up again. The protagonists are two very silly women, surrounded by other very silly people, all of them (I'm guessing) meant to be clever caricatures of the kind of nosy busybodies that are supposed to have inhabited English villages in centuries past, and indeed may still exist in some modern form for all I know. At any rate, there's nothing amusing or interesting enough about this story to make me want to finish it.

I always feel vaguely guilty when I give up on a book that's meant to be a classic -- like there's some kind of deficiency in my brain that makes me unable to appreciate the fineness of the book. Oh well. Here's to brain deficiency!

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