Vanity Fair
Penguin Classics

welcome to...JANITY FAIRBRUARY. i'm going to read this huge scary book for the next two months (i.e., january and february), one chapter a day, trying all the while not to run away in fear as per my project long classics directive. on that note, did authors from old times know it was possible to write......more

Here I am, 54 years old, and for the very first time reading William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. "Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero." I disagree with Thackeray. The 'Hero' of Vanity Fair is the steadfast and stalwart William Dobbin; of that there is no doubt. This novel is not the coming of......more

Written in 1848, Vanity Fair is an excellent satire of English society in the early 19th Century. Thackeray states several times that it is a novel "without a hero",and at a couple of points tries to claim that Amelia, a good person but who inevitably comes across as rather wishy-washy, is the her......more

1. I liked the company of Thackeray who is breezy, ebullient and cynical about everyone’s motives. And he’s very confident too. He thinks he knows everything, although there’s not a word about how the poor live here, that’s not his subject. So he’s like the mid-19th century version of Tom Wolfe or J......more

"But as we are to see a great deal of Amelia, there is no harm in saying, at the outset of our acquaintance, that she was a dear little creature. And a great mercy it is, both in life and in novels, which (and the latter especially) abound in villains of the most sombre sort that we are to have for......more