A finished object of a different sort: Last night I finished reading Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. I enjoy these novels because they are long; it took me over a year to read this one (I read other things in between nights of plugging away at the Trollope). It's a big, complex story with lots of characters. I want to start the continuation (Phineas Redux) soon, but I decided to take a short break and read something else.

As much as I love Trollope - the descriptions, the characters, the situations - there was one thing in this novel that somewhat tempered my enjoyment of it. One of the characters (who does not feature greatly until the final third of the book) is referred to occassionally as a "greasy Jew preacher" and other not very complimentary things. I did a quick search on "anti-Semitism in Trollope" and didn't turn up much other than that in some situations he made some of his characters make anti-Semitic comments (apparently it was a fashionable position to hold in mid-Victorian England). Apparently Trollope's point in those situations was to parody the stupid but fashionable ideas held by people. (And the site linked to is heavily about The Way We Live Now, which is generally the most widely-read (in academic circles) Trollope today. I've not read it yet.) But the words in Eustace Diamonds are the words of the narrator.

I don't know. I'm not Jewish and I don't consider myself overly sensitive, but the description made me wince pretty hard every time I ran across it.

I started a new novel - The Chymical Wedding by Lindsey Clarke. I'm about 25 pages in and it looks good - set in the North of England, with very descriptive passages. And there is some intrigue. A poet who is apparently somewhat burned-out is sent to stay in the cottage of his publisher. He witnesses an interesting (I dare say) scene where a sixtyish man and a twentyish woman are frolicing (naked) deep in the woods...the second chapter shifts time period abruptly. It seems the book may be a melding of mystery and fantasy. I don't generally go for the fantasy genre too much, but what I've read of this looks good.