Thomas Hardy is on my list of authors I wish to read in their entirety.  I picked up “Jude the Obscure” some years ago during a pilgrimage to Powell’s Books in Portland.  After bringing the book home, I kept choosing to start other titles because “Jude the Obscure” never sounded like a good time.

The preface (written by the author) talks about how critics initially hated the book.  This was possibly a sign.  Without ruining plot points, let’s just say several people make a long series of bad marriage-related decisions.  And I am not talking about that Jane Austen “he doesn’t earn as much interest as I had thought” fluff.  Despite being published in 1895, it deals with the idea of how long marriages should last and what it truly means to be married to another person.  Perhaps if I had read it before getting married I would have sought out a different arrangement.  You feel the characters constantly being pulled toward disaster.  One night near the end I decided to read just “one more chapter”.  Those few pages sent me to sleep in quite the depressed state.  So much human tragedy in so few sentences.

Jude the Obscure is like one of those independent films where at the end you are mildly shellshocked, don’t regret watching the story, but are sure you won’t repeat it.  I recommend you stick to “Return of the Native” or “The Mayor of Casterbridge”.  Thomas Hardy himself stopped writing novels altogether after publishing “Jude the Obscure”.