Books in Primary Colours: Yellow

As a means of briefly commenting on some of the books that I’ve either read before I started blogging or that I feel that I should talk about more often, I’m writing a three-part series of posts about three books whose covers are predominantly yellow, blue or red. Besides their covers being dominated by a primary colour, these books only need to have one more thing in common – to still have a place on my shelves.

The first post in this series is devoted to the colour yellow. The following books were penned by authors from different countries and whose writing styles are clearly dissimilar. One I loved, the others not so much.

 

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

The main characters in this novel are Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene. Gabriel is a young shepherd who has leased and stocked a sheep farm with money from his savings and a loan. He asks Bathsheba in marriage, but she refuses, since her independence is of great importance to her. Although she moves to another village, they end up meeting again. The circumstances have changed, though. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the book as much as I was expecting to. Having really relished the characters, my chief problem was getting bored with the many descriptions about rural life. I kept the book, as it’s a beautiful Penguin English Library edition.

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My Penguin English Library Collection

The Penguin English Library editions of classics caught my eye a few years ago while watching BookTube videos. I can’t remember the first channel I saw them in, but I immediately fell in love with the beautiful covers and stripy spines, and now every time I want to buy a new classic, I check if it is available in these editions. Unless there is an even more beautiful book for sale (which is the case of the vintage classics editions of the Jane Austen’s books, for example), I go for the covers designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Presently, I own ten books in the Penguin English Library editions. However, one of them, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, will not be part of my collection and is not mentioned in the following list, because I won’t keep it, as I really didn’t like it.

 

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Pip, the main character in Great Expectations, is an orphan who lives with his abusive sister and her husband. He tells the story of his life since childhood until adulthood. To live in difficult economic conditions isn’t a problem for Pip until the moment he meets Estella at Miss Havisham’s house and an anonymous benefactor wants him to become a gentleman. Although some parts of the novel got a bit monotonous, I still enjoyed my first taste of Charles Dickens’s works. I wrote a full review about it when I first started blogging.