I'd read a few of the Flashman series of books when I was much younger and recently found the first of the series on the free table at work. Opening up the first pages I learned that the main character of those books was based on an antagonist of the titular hero in the British classic Tom Brown's Schooldays. That book is from 1857 so it's public domain, so boom it got downloaded to Stanza on my iPhone* and I read the book over several months in waiting-in-line type situations.

I've had mixed luck lately with reading classics, and I was expecting something a little saccharine. And it's true that as Flashman says on the first page of his book, "Hughes … was more concerned to preach a sermon than to give facts." But despite the direct-to-the-reader preachiness that occupies great swathes of Tom Brown's School Days, it's still an easy read, a sort of pastorale of a (privileged) young man's life and schooling in the English public school system, specifically at Rugby in the 1830s.

* Didn't I promise not to bore you with details of how I'm reading books. Oops.

FuzzyCo grade: B-