I am, according to Kindle, roughly 65% of the way through Clarissa, which is about 1000 pages or so in. At my present rate of speed, (again, according to Kindle) it would take me a further 24 hours or so to finish it. I read the first 800 pages or so with an enthusiasm I thought I wouldn’t have for a book from that time period, and honestly, I hate not finishing a book, but at this point, at least, I’m gonna admit defeat. It’s pretty rare I don’t finish a book I start, and even rarer that I get this far along and bail, but I just don’t know what to do at this point. Clarissa has a lot to like; the transformation of the villan from “person with questionable motives” to “horrible dipshit” is well drawn and feels real. Clarissa’s stubborn father’s idiocy also feels real. “I will have no child but an obedient child” is a variation on something most children hear at some point, and while you want to smack him upside the head, he also comes across as someone who’s flaws are genuine, locked into a position he cannot back down because, well, he can’t. It’s not a logical position, but an emotional one. Every character has depth, and the world of wealth and privilege that the characters occupy is a gilded prison of manners and norms.
It’s also a slog. The level of detail makes sense, in some fashion; these are rich assholes who have nothing to do all day but pen letters to each other explaining their various positions and betrayals in excruciating detail. Richardson sometimes even edits these letters– not repeating information that would necessarily be repeated between characters, but each character still will spend hundreds of words saying what you and I might say in ten. It’s both the charm and the bane of the work, and as the story unfolded, it felt more like the latter. Some might say that the language is a barrier, but oddly years of reading weird postmodern novels kind of prepared me to keep a dictionary at hand, and to keep track of things as I went along.
But I can’t. It’s not you, Samuel Richardson, it’s me. Once Lovelace’s evil plot against Clarissa goes to shit, the book gets stuck into his perspective, and becomes… kind of cartoonish in its villany. Lovelace, who starts out as the book’s most interesting character in a lot of ways, turns into a whiny prick who endlessly recounts dialogues with people who know better than he does, and the overall effect is like being trapped in a room with a cranky drunk, and I can do that for real here in New Orleans with minimal effort.
I hate giving up on things, especially long things. I feel I figured out what makes Clarissa tick, and the melodrama isn’t enough to keep me walking along. It’s all plot, or “contract model” as we say here at The Lithole, and at this point in the book, things feel resolved enough. Or maybe it’s because it’s summer.
I have, since I started reading the majority of things on Kindle, kept track of what I read via Goodreads. Last year, I became super annoyed with Goodreads integration with Kindle– it would record me “starting” a book when I was glancing at it, etc, and so I switched to Storygraph, which allowed me to import Goodreads data, and I note that almost every year, I read a hell of a lot more in the early and later parts of the year, with the months of June and July in particular being an odd slump. My birthday is in June, so maybe celebrating it distracts me or something. There’s no real reason I can think of, but it’s a fact.
Right now I am reading a biography of Ian Fleming “The Complete Man”, which is both exhaustive and fairly interesting. I really only knew about Fleming’s life as “the Bond guy”, and getting a bigger background enhances my slow climb through the Bond series, and “Rando Splicer” which is the sixth book in a hard sci-fi series thats… 100% contract model. In particular, I like the way the author handles action scenes, and the plot has become so dense I am afraid light will not escape it. But it does what it says on the tin, and for this kind of book, that’s good enough.
The Lithole 
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