It took me a little over a year of stops and starts and deliberately reading other books that were not written by James Joyce, but I have finished Ulysses. And now, what to say? This is one of those books, you know? You either have read it or will read it or you have no interest in reading it or you’ll read ten (or 90 or 500) pages and think whythefuck and move on with your life. Whatever works for you, really.

Mark my words: this time I'm going to finish it.

For almost three years now, I have sporadically been reading classic works (or at least really old works) of literature and reporting on them here at LitKicks for the Jamelah Reads the Classics series. So far, I've read and reported on several books. (At present, I'm still quasi-working on James Joyce's Ulysses. Maybe I'll be done with that by June.)

Progress: pathetic and sad.

Since the last time I wrote about my experience reading this book, I've been busy. I got distracted by... things. And my reading time ended up falling by the wayside, which means that when I finally got un-distracted and picked the book back up, I had pretty much forgotten everything I'd read. I mean, I know what I read, but I lost the rhythm of it.

In short, I'm starting over.

Technically, I'm supposed to be reading The Good Earth right now, at least if I were going in order with my list of classics, but I started out of order by reading The Maltese Falcon first, so I guess when it comes to chronology, all bets are off this time around.

I've been having a hard time starting this post because I'm not really sure what to write about this book. Not because I didn't like it; on the contrary, I liked it quite a lot. Which is the problem. I liked it so much that I sort of feel that anything I write will be kind of pointless in comparison. But I'll try anyway. So. To the Lighthouse is about the Ramsay family (and assorted friends, acquaintances and guests) staying at a summer home in Scotland. Premise-wise, it doesn't sound very interesting, and on the surface, perhaps it isn't.

Note: For the first time in the entire two-something-year history of Jamelah Reads the Classics, I am reading books out of order. According to my list, I should've kicked things off with To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, but I'm not because I recently finished this one and I want to write about it right now. So I have to save Virginia Woolf for next time. If any are necessary, you have my apologies.

One of the reasons I started my occasional series, Jamelah Reads the Classics, is because there are all these books in the world that I want to read -- I keep a running list in my head, appropriately titled Books I Want to Read Before I Die -- and it is very long. So long, in fact, that I know I will never get all the way through it before I inevitably stop breathing, even if I happen to live for a very very long time, which I probably won't because I have a thing for bad habits.

In case you were wondering, yes, I am still reading the classics. It's my calling. And Mary Wollstonecraft's polemic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was next on my list, so here we are.

Published in 1613, Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam is universally accepted as the first drama published by a woman. Cary was a contemporary of Shakespeare, though due to the fact that she was memorialized in a biography by one of her daughters (the exact author is unknown), more is known about her than her more famous Elizabethan playwright counterpart. Elizabeth Cary was quite scholarly, and knew (and translated works from) French, Spanish, Latin and Hebrew.