Friday, November 30, 2012

Barchester Towers: Beginning

The next book up is Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope.  In terms of the numbers, the Kindle copy I have of this book is 599 pages long and can be found for free here.
 
This book was published in 1857 and is actually the second book in the "Chronicles of Barsetshire" series by Trollope.  The first book in the series is called The Warden and I considered reading that first, but Barchester Towers is more well-known and from what I've heard from other people, can be read as a stand-alone book as well.  So it's the only work of Trollope's on my list.
 
The story follows the lives of the leading clergy members of the cathedral town of Barchester, England.  Unlike many of the other books on my list, I'm not very familiar with this story, so it will be interesting to go into it with no real knowledge of it.  According to Wikipedia, the story is a sort of satire concerning the antipathy in the Church of England between the High Church and the Evangelical followers. 
 
Trollope himself was actually a postal worker in his early days as a novelist and apparently used letters from the "lost letter" box for ideas for his early works.

As far as film adaptations, the BBC put out versions of The Warden and Barchester Towers together as The Barchester Chronicles in 1982 starring Alan Rickman.

2 comments:

  1. I bought that book you wrote about, "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew" for my Nook. While I knew some of the stuff in it, I still learned a lot. I just finished the Complete Sherlock Holmes, and read the Complete Charles Dickens earlier this year, and this answered some questions I had. Thanks.

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    1. Fantastic! I'm glad you liked it! Thanks for letting me know; I always like to know that someone appreciates my blog posts and gets some use out of them! Thanks.

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