Spotlight Sunday is a weekly meme created by Balie @ Nerd in New York & Closet Readers for their Goodreads book club, Nerdy Reads. Each Sunday share a book that you think is underrated and needs to be read ASAP – put it in the spotlight! *wink-wink, nudge-nudge*
Rules:
- Make sure to link back to the original creators in your post.
- Share your post on the Goodreads page so that others can read your post.
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
If you’re like me, then you are pretty big fan of the classics. Austen, Tolstoy, Dumas, etc. are some of your favorites and you can never tire of rereading some of them. However, I feel that some of the books from this period tend to get lost in the crowd, especially from the lesser known writers. So if you’re interested in expanding your knowledge of the classics – I highly recommend you pick up Vanity Fair next. And when you’re finished reading the book, watch the film adaptation starring Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp. It really is a fantastic movie!
Warning: This book isn’t one of Austen’s happy ending fairytales, this one is a bit more realistic and dark.
“I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year,” observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest—and most appealing—women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, a wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use all her wit, charm and considerable sex appeal to escape her drab destiny as a governess. From London’s ballrooms to the battlefields of Waterloo, the bewitching Becky works her wiles on a gallery of memorable characters, including her lecherous employer, Sir Pitt, his rich sister, Miss Crawley, and Pitt’s dashing son, Rawdon, the first of Becky’s misguided sexual entanglements.
Filled with hilarious dialogue and superb characterizations, Vanity Fair is a richly entertaining comedy that asks the reader, “Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”
What book do you think is underrated and deserves the spotlight? Have you read Vanity Fair before? Leave a link to your own Spotlight Sunday post in the comments!
Wonderfilled Reads 
What a coincidence! Rarely does anyone mention Vanity Fair, but for some reason I’ve been really wanting to read it. I think one of the things that holds me back is that it’s like a thousand pages long. Did it take you a long time to get through it? Anyway, thanks for the great review, and I will for sure check out the movie after I read it. 😀
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Yes, exactly! It’s considered a literary classic but no one ever mentions it. It’s such a great book too. It’s funny, clever, pretty raunchy for the time, and realistic. It is a really long book but it actually didn’t take me very long to read it, as it reads really well and is fairly fast paced. I think maybe two weeks? And definitely watch the movie… soooo good!
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You know what I’ll do? Maybe I’ll read Vanity Fair during the summer when I have more time. It’ll be fun to do a book/movie combo. Thanks for the suggestion!
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Oh, that sounds like a good idea! I hope you enjoy it when you get to it! 🙂
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