** spoiler alert ** 
 Came across this book and I had heard of the name Thomas Hardy before, took it with me as I remember it being described as a sort of early feminist and socialist piece-of-writing and the supposed bleakness made me curious as well. And I did like it, but probably not as much as some others here. Basically, I really enjoyed the the first half of the book. From the beginning it managed to keep my attention. But then later on, the second half, I just got more and more annoyed. 
 I just thought that Jude and Sue were overly fucking sensitive all the time, both of them just having a breakdowns whenever confronted with something. Your lovers' ex-wife is at the door and wants to talk to your lover, what's the fucking problem, why would you end up crying for days? And then just going on and on about matrimony and its consequences. Thomas Hardy in the preface (if I remember correctly) complains about how reviewers misinterpreted the message of the novel and scandalized it for its views on matrimony (that were very controversial at that time) even though that is only a minor part of the story. But seriously, it's not just a minor part of the story, it just goes on and on and on throughout the whole second part. I do understand that the message is more about how if you follow your ideals (the painful truth) that you will be fucked over by society and how this matrimony business functions to show this, but that doesn't stop the book from talking about marriage all the time. 
 I guess I just didn't find it all that believable. Perhaps I'm just too much 21st-century to empathize with it all. In general I'm having serious problems understanding this romantic falling-in-love-with-one-single-person-your-entire-life stuff (I never really had that myself and I don't find sex to be such a big deal). Contemporary books can be like that as well, but 19th century novels just about always have it. 
 Anyway, I did enjoy the bleakness of it all. Father Time's action came to a shock to me and was actually quite hilarious in how over the top it was. And I really liked the circle of free-thinking Sue poking holes in Jude's dogmatic religious views, with Sue later then being coerced by society into becoming highly religious after all the trauma and the freed Jude having to deal with that.