The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen

Gosh, what do I say about The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy? A book that people have been reading for two hundred and fifty years.I picked this up on the force of a placement on some Top XXX Books posted on The Guardian, maybe? I’d tried to read it a couple of years ago on Kindle but the version that I downloaded was really poorly formatted and the whole thing put me off. The copy I eventually picked up off World of Books online for two quid + s&h evidently had sat unread and untouched on someone’s shelf for yonks: the corners were crisp and square and uncurled by rough use in backpacks, and the spine was unbroken and sunbleached. I think that this was probably an aspirational purchase for whoever owned this book before me; I would ensure it would not be so again.I will tell you that Tristram Shandy is an eminently easy book to read and a difficult book to finish. Chapters are nice and short, and Sterne sort of wanders from topic to topic so you never really build up much…