Last week, I finished my project of reading all the novels of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), as my fifth such project in the last few years: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and now Hardy. In the end, I liked "Far From The Madding Crowd" (1874) and "The Woodlanders" (1887). I was less appreciative of some of Hardy's more famous titles, including "Jude the Obscure" (1895) and "The Mayor of Casterbridge" (1886). Of those five novelists, Hardy is the most erratic to me, with "Two on a Tower" (1882) being the worst novel I have ever read by a canonical author. Now I'm starting a run through F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 July 2026)