So … Yeah … I think I’ve done it again. I’ve signed up for the Clarissa read-a-long. Yeah. Now I don’t know much about this book – except that it’s written in letters (537 of them) and it’s 1536 pages long. Supposedly it’s one of the greatest of all European novels. And it’s on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die which I’m (slowly) working my way through. And it definitely count as a chunkster – oh, except for the tiny thing that I’m reading it on my Kindle and e-books are not allowed as part of the Chunkster Reading Challenge… So even though it’s 1500+ pages, I can’t use it for this challenge unfortunately. Oh well, then I get to read another huge book this year!
Clarissa was first published in 1748 and it’s about a young girl who after resisting an arranged marriage, is tricked into fleeing with a man called Lovelace. This turns out to be a rather bad idea and well, as far as I can gather, things go really downhill for Clarissa from there.
So the read-a-long I’ve signed up for is hosted by Terri at Tip of the Iceberg and JoAnn at Lakeside Musing. The thing about this Clarissa read-a-long that really made me want to do this is, that the read-a-long reads the letters at the corresponding days. The first letter is written on January 11th and the last on December 7th so if I can keep myself to reading the letters on the right days, I’ll have Clarissa as a companion for the entire year. Of course, I’m starting a couple of days late but not much so it will work out fine, I’m sure.
My plan is to post regular updates on this project as I read along, depending on how caught up in the story I get.
A couple of articles about Clarissa:
The Literary Bunny 