More Tom Jones

This is just an insanely long book, I suppose. I finished Book 12, and I'm going to take a break with some lighter fare while I'm in New York, then finish the whole shebang.

Thanks to all the political set pieces, I think I know more about the Jacobites than I wanted to know. It's certainly a different point-of-view than what you find in, say, the Willoughby Chase books, which are very anti-Hanoverian. It's just a bit bizarre--the plot's moving along at a good clip, and then everything stops dead while Fielding talks about what idiots the Jacobites are. Then it moves along again.

Of course, as we see in the intro to this book, Fielding kinda-sorta condones jumping around anyway--he writes that he knows it happens, and his goal is to write a book that's entertaining enough that people don't skip around in it.