Day 9: A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving

I’d imagine that this is not a terribly common choice is this category.  During my sophomore year of college, I took “The British Novel I”.  Pamela was the second book we read.  My copy was four pages long, and they were large pages, and the print was small.  At first I was quite distressed to see that apparently the entire thing was going to be about a young and innocent maid struggling to resist the advances of a rich guy.

Then, oddly enough, I started to appreciate the book.  It is long.  It is repetitive.  One part consists of the narrator simply listing all of the things that she had written previously, which is simply the events of the book up to that point.  But all of it serves a point.  It is an in-depth character study, where everybody, major and minor, gets a chance to be developed.  Richardson’s moral values are not twenty-first century values, but in this work he accomplishes what every author should strive to accomplish.  He takes us inside a person’s viewpoint and allows us to explore that person with depth and subtlety.