Vanity Fair: R.R. Martin V. Makepeace Thackeray

I'm getting "reading credits" for this summer, so the idea was that as soon as I finished my final papers for my spring 2011 courses, I'd start reading. I was going to be traveling for about a month at the beginning of the summer, so I loaded up my Kindle with about 15 public domain e-texts that I thought might be likely to stay on my list, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese to Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; as I lifted my backpack, which contained one Kindle and one netbook, I congratulated myself on choosing the nineteenth century.

Papers were due on May 23, but since I was getting on a plane on May 18 to celebrate a friend's wedding on a Greek island, I figured I'd have my work done by then, and that I'd start on my first book--William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 Vanity Fair, a book I figured was very likely to stay on my list--on the plane. Of course, what really happened was that I spent the plane trip, and the 9-hour unexpected layover at Heathrow, and the bright shining mornings in our room at the island resort, painfully and furiously editing my last paper, which I submitted via e-mail as I sprawled poolside on a wicker divan minutes before the shuttle arrived to take us to the ferry off the island. So since my coursework wasn't done, I didn't feel like it was time to start my orals reading; instead, I rewarded myself for doing homework on vacation by reading George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones at bedtime, by the pool while drinking sparkling water and eating a Greek salad, on the ferry, and in the shadow of the Acropolis. My husband was reading the autobiography of The Stig from the English TV show Top Gear, so we were both engaging in these kind of escapist fantasies, and anyway we were enacting an escapist fantasy by even being on that island, so it was fine.

But then we were on the plane from Athens to Florence, where we'd be meeting up with my family and where I'd be staying with my mother for a couple of weeks, and it seemed like it was time to straighten out and fly right (even if our pilot kind of couldn't: "We have decided not to land the aircraft for operational reasons," he told us. "THIS IS COMPLETELY NORMAL."). Also I had finished A Game of Thrones, and also all the stuff about intrigue at court and betrayal and ambushes was making me paranoid: "I can count on Friend X's support, I think, and Friend Y will remain neutral, but Friend Z has been waiting for me to take a false step since we were children together . . ." So my husband convinced me it was time to start doing my real reading. After all, that adorable Becky Sharp won't be mixed up in any intrigue or betrayal or trickiness of any kind!

When I was about 15% of the way through Vanity Fair, however, I decided it would be nice just to have the next Game of Thrones book on my Kindle, so I downloaded A Clash of Kings. My husband has bet me 5 euro that this will ruin my reading schedule, and that I'll finish CoK before I finish VF. I think I'm pretty safe, though, since I'm like 20% of the way through Vanity Fair (I'm reading it on the Kindle, remember?) and Clash  of Kings seems to be super, super boring.