I finished this on Thursday



Blimey what a struggle that was, it took me nearly 4 weeks to read it.

It is extremely wordy (even for the time that it was written) and the story never really goes any where, well I say the story, it is actually a story in a story in a story...possibly in another story, the main character is barely in the book and the problem with the multiple stories that all tie in together is that if you get one or two that you can't get into or don't enjoy then you start drifting off and ultimatly end up getting kind of lost.

I was hoping to find something like The Monk but unfortunately I was left pretty dissapointed

Anyway, now it's time for some controversial reading



The year was 1865. With the close of the Civil War, there began for the South, an era of even greater turmoil. In The Clansman, his controversial 1905 novel, later the basis of the motion picture The Birth of a Nation, Thomas Dixon, describes the social, political, and economic disintegration that plagued the South during Reconstruction, depicting the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the reactions of two families to racial conflict. This study in social history was alternatively praised and damned by contemporary critics. As historian Thomas D. Clark notes in his introduction, the novel "opened wider a vein of racial hatred which was to poison further an age already in social and political upheaval. Dixon had in fact given voice in his novel to one of the most powerful latent forces in the social and political mind of the South." For modern readers, The Clansman probes the roots of the racial violence that still haunts our society.
I'm about half way through now, it's not easy going, and the author is clearly not going to win any awards for his writing style but it's interesting.
I have to admit that I was expecting it to be 'negroe this' and 'negroe that' but it's actually not like that at all so far, the majority of the book has been about the politics behind the scenes after Abe Lincoln was shot.
There is the obligatory love interest between a bloke from the sound and a girl from the North but there really hasn't been any abuse directly towards the blacks at all so far.

Having said that you can feel it is building and you know that it is going to be a case of 'South good' North bad' Blacks very very bad'

It's interesting to read it just to see the opinions of those at the other side of the fence even if you don't agree with them.