Haven't had much time to read lately, but found enough in which to finish Rasselas. There's a lot to be said for short novels when you're time-starved, though I'm not sure you can classify Rasselas as such. More like a cleverly stitched-together sequence of brilliantly insightful essays that would otherwise have gone into The Rambler under another name.
Funny that Johnson couldn't recognise a genuine novel for what it was when he read one. I'm thinking of his casual dismissal of Tristram Shandy in which, for all Sterne's playful experimentation, the characters live. Does anyone really believe in Rasselas & Imlac et al? It'd be nice to praise the good Doctor for creating female characters of real intelligence, except that Nekayah and Pekuah are just the male characters in drag.
So is Rasselas worth reading, and what makes it so? Yes it is. And it's the ideas that do it, and the wonderful expression of them.
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