Coming out of January already having read two of the books on my list, I was feeling pretty damn cocky. Enough that I added a second challenge, which was to also watch film adaptations of all of the books, trailing behind my reading list as fast as my Netflix queue could keep up.

I based the choice of adaptation on whether they were reportedly:

1. Very good
2. Very bad
3. Starring the cast of The Lord of the Rings

Great Expectations (1998) qualified strongly as #2. It was utterly incoherent. How bad could an Ethan Hawke movie be? I had wondered. Now I know.

Jane Eyre (1997) wasn’t so great either, which was similarly disappointing because I like Samantha Morton. She isn’t bald or mute in Jane Eyre but she is pretty spacey and weird, much like her Princess Leia hairdo. The adaptation was worth watching if only because it threw into relief the aspects of the book that were interesting to a modern reader. In the novel she has a frank wit that makes men notice her. She’s comfortable in her unattractiveness and gets creeped out when she’s objectified as a beauty. She rejects being the mistress of a man she loves but can’t marry, but then she suggests being the unmarried (platonic) companion of another man who would marry her but doesn’t love her. When she finally does marry the man she loves, it’s after he’s become blind and disfigured and she’s independently wealthy. Most of those interesting rough spots are missing from the movie. And the girl who plays the little French chick totally sucks, holy crap.

So far, The Portrait of a Lady is pretty dull. The movie isn’t available on Netflix. It features Aragorn.

I got Reading Lolita in Tehran for Christmas and it was a great book, but it made me feel like kind of a jerk. There are people literally dying to read works of literature that most of us have, at best, fond memories of bullshitting our way through class pretending to have read. In addition to all the other books I’ll read this year, I decided to pile on some classics of English literature that I hadn’t read before or seen movie adaptations of. After some research and consultation, I came up with this list:

1. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
2. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
3. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
4. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
5. George Eliot, Middlemarch
6. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
7. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
8. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
9. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
10. Jane Austen, Persuasion
11. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
12. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

I’m going to read all twelve in 2005, although not necessarily one per month.

What’s been more interesting than the project is the vehemence of some responses from friends. There’s still a lot of hostility floating around these books that I suppose is tied up with their exaulted position in the literary canon and some hazy memories of dreadfully dull English classes. I’m hoping that I’ll find it a different experience to read them without a grade at stake, but in all likelihood my friends will be right, and this will turn out to be really boring.

After I finished the novel, I was relieved to discover that nearly everyone, including Henry James, thinks the first third of the book is entirely too long and slow. And this is by the standard of other 19th century novels. Events do happen, and rapidly once they’re underway, and it’s no surprise that the 1996 film version compresses the first 300 pages into 20 minutes and the remainder of the book is covered more or less faithfully.

By the end of the book I thought I understood Isabel Archer’s character thoroughly, but I’ve been surprised to find readers who view her as an innocent and a hero. Certainly, there’s a lot for a 21st century female reader to admire: Isabel states that she may never marry, that she wants to spend her youth travelling and experiencing the world. I suppose these readers view her ultimate marriage to Gilbert Osmond as simply a fateful mistake borne out of her trusting nature. Instead I saw it as an inevitable consequence of her pride and her stubborn desire to subvert the wishes of the people who care about her.

Isabel does get to travel the world, but it’s an experience so uninspiring that it’s completely elided in the novel (the movie depicts it, bizarrely, in the style of a silent film). I read this episode as illustrating two points. In the 19th century, even a wealthy and unattached woman did not have much opportunity to actually do anything engaging — she can be at best merely a spectator. As Isabel’s “friend” Madame Merle remarks, “a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl.” Beyond that, Isabel’s fault is that simply moving about in the world does not satisfy her. From the moment the book opens, she is flattered or proposed to by an astonishing number of men, and her response upon returning from this empty journey is to rush to the one person for whom none of her friends are advocating. She is self-centered and willful at heart, but charming and intelligent on the surface.

The movie makes some questionable changes to the story’s chronology. Readers are uncertain about Osmond’s motives until well after the marriage; in the film, well, he’s played by John Malkovich with the sneer factor cranked way up. While I’m on the subject of casting, I was disappointed to find Martin Donovan to be both sickly and mustached. Christian Bale is about 15 years old. Aragorn does get to make out with Nicole Kidman but his lack of scraggly beard and her 19th century beehive hairdo do not flatter either one of them.

I was a little baffled by Kidman’s Isabel jumping into bed with her dying cousin and making out with him, and then shortly after his funeral getting it on with Aragorn. The film also changes the ending from definitively tragic to ambiguous and hopeful. I was predictably enraged, but overall it’s not bad.

Next: Roman Polanski. The movie Tess does not star anyone from The Lord of Rings, and while it features both “Peter Firth” and “John Collin,” Colin Firth is disappointingly absent. I’ve already finished the novel and am plowing through Middlemarch.

The place having been rather hastily prepared for them they washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water.

“Which are my fingers and which are yours?” he said, looking up. “They are very much mixed.”

“They are all yours,” said she, very prettily, and endeavoured to be gayer than she was.

It’s a miracle that once women could bear arms and drive cars that they didn’t just open fire indiscriminately and then get the hell out of Dodge. It’s surprising because subjected peoples have historically undertaken some pretty violent retributions for past injustices. Western women’s transition from chattel to equal partner occurred with virtually no bloodshed, and even now women’s rights focus exclusively on issues relevant today, whereas hand-wringing over America’s slave-owning past or Germany’s Nazi one is still a going concern. In sheer numbers over the centuries, surely females have suffered at the hands of males more than any ethnic group under any other.

Nobody in this country is happy about about the way countries like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria treat their women, but their abuses have never provoked the kind of mobilized outrage that, say, apartheid did. In the United States I could write some of that off as trickle-down from U.S. oil policy and an unhealthy reverence for religious beliefs of any stripe, but I don’t see regular marches in the streets of Toronto about it either. We seem to regard women’s subjugation as just an unfortunate but natural primitivism, like weather gods or royal families.

The thing is, I love men. Men are awesome. Not only are they appealingly hairy and bumpy in all the right places, they aren’t judging whether my fashions are up-to-the-minute current, they don’t ask me about how I feel, and they offer useful skills like soldering, math, and opening jars from tall shelves. I have lots of women friends too, but they require regular maintenance and their friendships don’t come as easily to me. I get along well with guys, I have interests in common with guys, and they like me because they like women who are as smart, funny and independent as they.

So I have a hard time understanding why so many other men, historically and presently, can be such total raging assholes.