This tied me up for several weeks, on and off, but it was pretty much worth it, I reckon. I didn't know of the novel's reputation as a classic that no one reads - I expected it to be all witty, cutting social satire, deflating the pretensions of society with one incisive bon mot after another (the cattier the better), etc, and so exactly one of the kinds of novels that I most enjoy reading.
As it turns out, there is a fair bit of the latter, but it's not as constant or sustained as I'd anticipated, and more or less to the extent that it isn't, the novel drags in places, making it occasionally a bit of a slog. Overall, though, I enjoyed it - there's enough Story there to keep the pages ticking by even when the sharp edge of Thackeray's really being particularly scathing is temporarily missing, and the characters hang together as constructs (individually and relationally) and properly come alive in their ups and downs, which helps a great deal too.
