THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME by H.G. Wells

Well then.  Last night marked a first for our young book club – no one, including Dave, finished this book.  We had some valiant efforts: Trilety and Kat both made it to page 73, Chuck got into the triple digits, Dean made it to 150.  In the other column, Mick threw his albatross of a book over to Trilety and announced it was not allowed back in his home after page 25, and I never even opened it.  In my defense, I live with Dean.  If he’s having a hard time getting through a book, that’s my dead canary in the shaft.  There’s no way I’m going in.

Dave said that his inability to finish the book was due to “one of the things I liked best, namely the archaic writing style and the vocabulary words that had me searching (futilely) for my OED.  There’s a complexity to the writing that is completely absent from modern fiction which I really appreciated.  Sadly this also led me to fall asleep nearly every time I picked up the book.  This somnolence should not be looked upon as a failing on the book, but rather a shortcoming of this reader.”  Mick disagreed with this statement, saying that the writing style was one of the more offensive characteristics because it wasn’t clear to a room full of intelligent folks and none of us were able to access it well.  I countered that I don’t think H.G. Wells was meaning for plebs like us to read this – when education was more class based, say from the time writing was invented to about fifty years ago in developed countries, it wasn’t enough that you knew how to read but that you were properly acculturated to tolerate such density.