Bonsoir Penelope, bienvenue dans le monde de
Vanity Fair!
You should say,'Penelope and I', my darling, not 'and me'
Ah, a little grammar... Let's see how we can argue this.
"I" is a subject pronoun and "me" is an object pronoun.
So, I would say "Penelope and I are reading
Vanity Fair but :
Join Penelope and me, as in "join us."
I am reading it.....I am reading it....wait, wait, wait......slow reader...me.
Do you want to finish the book before we start discussing?
If you do I'll wait of course, but I thought we could discuss it chapter by chapter, as you read.
To give you an idea of what I mean, here are two questions to start with about chapter 1:
1- The tone: how does the novelist present his characters?
2- If you were asked to single out a single act in the first chapter that you found memorable, what would it be?
There are a few questions I'm going to ask myself at the same time (!), things you don't have the time to look into at a first reading:
-viewpoint (does it shift, and how?)
- The novel was first published in serialized form: what about chapter titles, and how do the chapters end?
It so happens that another novel I'm reading at the moment uses eighteenth and nineteenth century patterns in the English novel as a model:
A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth.
I'll be comparing them as I read-- I can already see similitudes and marked differences between the two.
Have you read
A Suitable Boy ? At one point in the 1990's it seemed that half the people I knew were reading it, but somehow I only bought it a few weeks ago.
India is one of my favourite topics by the way, and next is... China.
Ophelia.
