OMG! OUP has a book club! And it’s about classics! (Sound of me fainting dead away).
(Sound of me picking self up.) OK, ANYWAY, last month’s book was Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I’ve never read this and have just ordered it from the library. The current book, the one for June, is Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I will reveal that I started to read Tess about a year ago, got about a third of the way through, and found it so full of impending dread that I had to put it down. If I recall, Tess was about to make a terrible mistake driven by guilt and doubt and desire, a mistake that you just knew would wind up coming back to haunt her a hundredfold.
By myself, I just couldn’t bear to finish the book and see poor Tess crushed by circumstance and fate (at least, this is what seemed to me was going to happen). But for Oxford … I’ll pick it up where I left off and do my darnedest.