I could hear the Hallelujah chorus being sung in my subconscious as I finally, after months of reading, finished Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Now to be fair part of the reason it took so long to finish was because I twice had to stop reading in order to memorize lines for plays. So I took the opportunity of having a two week break from theater to finish this very long and at times infuriatingly side tracking novel. The core story is pretty good and is somewhat of a morality tale (SparkNotes says it's about virtue in action rather than as thought) with twists and turns and a not perfect but noble minded protagonist. The end of the story is perhaps a bit too much tied up in a nice little bow but I suppose a somewhat comedic moral story should be. The very aggravating part of this book is the constant interruption of the main story. The novel is broken down into 18 books with each book consisting of about 8 to 10 chapters or so and the first chapter of each book is the author waxing philosophical about writing and critics and whatever else, it's like he used this space in each book as a sort of 18th century blog. The novel also contains quite a few 'rabbit trails' leading off in all different directions many of which do not play into or at least very little into the main story. The writing is good, it flows well, so while it was aggravating slogging through much of the book, it wasn't a chore. Several times I thought about quitting this book, my wife encouraged me to on several occasions as I complained so much about it, but I wanted to see what happened to Tom, Sophia and the gang. So, would I recommend this book? Not really, not unless you just feel the need to read books people say are classics. Which I guess I kinda do, this was the first novel in a collection called The Complete Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction; 200 Greatest Novels, Short Stories and Poems Ever Written, edited by Charles Eliot and Christopher Hong that I bought for my kindle. I'm afraid Tom Jones has made me somewhat tepid about the merits of the rest of this collection.
