New Players: Tess and Candide

Success is defined as the favorable, prosperous termination of endeavors or the attainment of wealth, position, honors, or the like. Looking at the above definition, I am not sure whether or not finishing my books on file project can be considered a success. True, I did terminate an endeavor, but was it prosperous. In terms of the grade I am likely to receive, probably not, but in terms of the fact that I just finished reading and doing a project on two famous literary works, maybe. Candide and Tess of the d'Urbervilles are two novels that have been dissected and widely read by scholars for years. There must some reason behind this.
Candide, by Voltaire, was an extremely awkward book to read and understand due to the randomness of it all. The action in the novel seemed to be taking place in a different area every few pages and people kept dying and coming back to life. It was almost absurd to try and read it. If a person got his head chopped off, some magical surgeon or physician could sew it back on and fix it. It seemed that Voltaire was almost satirizing death. After finishing the novel and reading up on the background of the novel, it began to make a little more sense. Before reading the book, I had no idea that the novel was a satire. This was likely a mistake on my part because it caused me to extremely confused and caused my initial lasting impression of the novel to be rather bad. As I previously mentioned, I better understood the novel after learning that Voltaire wrote the novel as a satire of Leibnitz philosophy. Leibnitz, a rival philosopher to Voltaire, claimed that all was for the best at all times. Through a character in the novel named Pangloss, Voltaire showed the absurdity of the claim through a series of random events. The mission of achieving a full satire was the reason for actually randomizing the events. Despite my initial dislike due to my ignorance, I can see why it is considered one of the greatest philosophical, satirical novels of all time.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, was an extremely Victorian and romantic novel with love taking a major place in the novel's action and plot. This romantic nature caused me to dislike the novel. Also the language is romantic and dare I say mushy at times and did not contain the slightest appeal to me. Although the genre really didn't suit me, I can appreciate good writing when I see it. Hardy does an amazing job of setting the scene. Each time there was a scene change, Hardy followed with a deep description of the environment, so deep that I could easily visualize the location in my mind. Also, to augment the completeness of the description of the scene, Hardy seemed to seamlessly integrate the characters into the setting. The character's personalities and descriptions matched that of the setting. Overall, the novel was amazingly written, but the genre did not suit me.