This weekend I read Possessionby A.S. Byatt. It’s been a few months since I’ve really sat down to read a novel (I read poetry and nonfiction all the time), and I enjoyed Byatt’s work. Possession is a novel that takes the reader into the world of two scholars who are researching the “forbidden” romance between two (fictional) Victorian writers. Because there are days I believe that I really belong in the world of 19th century literature (I finished Drood by Dan Simmons a few months ago and loved it!), I appreciated the way Byatt intertwined journal entries, letters, and contemporary settings together to tell a story. When I googled the book’s title, I found that not everybody appreciated this story — several readers found the book “boring” and “tiresome.” I do wonder if I liked the book because of the way it shows how academic scholars investigate the world of past literature. I also wonder if the novel was based on characters that may have been real. Everywhere I looked, the summaries of the book emphasized that the two Victorian writers are fictional, but still….
Oh! And there’s a movie. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart. I’ll have to see if I can pick that up somewhere….
The Scrapper Poet 