MissWatson wants to retire her BFBs

It's my first year of retirement, and one of my ambitious plans is to diminish the number of big fat books on my TBR. Let's see how this goes...

Good luck! I must admit, I often tend to skip the BFBs and pick up smaller books. But like you, I need to get some of my big books on my shelf read and ticked off. I may join you in your Wilkie Collins reading this year!

Hi Jayne! The nice thing about Wilkie Collins is that he has also written quite a few short stories, if you're not in the mood for his doorstoppers.

Hi Birgit, great to see you here too. Good luck with your BFB reading.

Thanks, Connie. I hope to do better this year!

>3 MissWatson: Yes, I took a BB from you in the challenge group for his Little Novels, which I can spread over a month or so.

>6 JayneCM: He re-used some of the themes in his bigger novels.

I have finished my first BFB, Eldest by Christopher Paolini. I'm re-reading the series and trying to make up my mind if I really want or need the latest instalment...I had forgotten most of the details, and I can at least say that it still held my interest.

My second BFB is The woman in white by Wilkie Collins, 636 pages in a pretty little edition from OUP. This was a bit different from what I remembered, it would seem that the TV version I remember simplified it a little.
I wonder if one BFB per month is overly ambitious?

Hi Birgit my dear, lovely to see you again, have a good 2024 BFB reading year.

>10 johnsimpson: Thanks John! It's lovely to be here again, and I hope to read quite a few more than last year!

And I have finished a BFB in March: After the ice by Steven Mithin, which runs to 622 pages.
This is a non-fiction book of human history from 20,000 to 5,000 BC, covering all continents, with copious footnotes which I did read.
Overall, it was disappointing, because the presentation is so confusing. Two sets of small black-and-white photographs of digsites are sop smudged that you can barely recognise what they depict, and a few illustrations are hidden between pages 466 and 477, never referenced in the text.

And another BFB: Guy Mannering clocks in at 720 pages.
First published in 1815, my copy was published in 1898 with an author's preface from 1829 in which he explains the rather odd composition: he changed his plans midway through writing when the first chapters were already out in print in a magazine. It also has an editor's preface, notes from editor and author and an extensive glossary which I used frequently, as there is lots and lots of dialogue in Scots.
I liked this much better than Waverley, because there are no real events to accommodate which sölowed down the action so much in the first novel. This is more like a romance, dashed off in very short time, and has quite a few Gothic elements: the ruined castle, the noble family fallen onto hard times, a kidnapped heir, smugglers, banditti and gypsies (as they were called in those days), but everybody behaves quite sensibly and even rationally, even the girls.

I'm surprising myself with another BFB this month: Die Henkerstochter runs to 512 pages. As a mystery, it's average, as historical fiction a trifle too modern in its language. But there's enough suspense to make me read it in one go.

Finally, another BFB is finished, and it is very good indeed: Der Thronfolger, a novel about Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It paints a very convincing pyschological portrait of a difficult man condemned to spend his life waiting for his uncle to die, and it gives a good sense of the oppressive atmosphere of the court.

Geschichte der Spätantike runs to 604 pages, including the index which I did consult several times. It is a very dense history of late antiquity, in a popular edition without footnotes. That makes for comparatively smooth reading, but I would have liked to check up on some quotes...

Romola shows George Eliot deeply immersed in the history of Renaissance Florence, and her erudition often weighs down the story which runs to 692 pages in my edition. It is a pretty hardcover edition with far too many typos that often made the sense of Eliot’s dense prose unintelligible, so off to the bin it goes.

I managed to read 8 BFBs this year, I thought I’d do better, but other books are so enticing. Sigh. Need, no, hope to do better next year.