Tale of Two Cities is a good tale

Chuck took it up a notch, or five notches with this book. A fantastic piece of writing, the characters are deeper and less caricatured, the story is grittier, and there's blood. Lots of death this time, and not just allusions to it, but descriptions of specific people dying, which I don't think has happened to the same extent in previous books.

What was I missing when I read this book in grade school? I must have been an idiot...

Ah well, on to a book I've been looking forward to for a long time: Great Expectations.

S.

time heals all; Christmas stories

Five minutes ago I read the conclusion of Little Dorrit. A fine piece of writing, full of the kind of characters Dickens is so good at bringing to vivid life - some purely good, some purely evil, some purely comic, all purely entertaining.

Plot-wise, perhaps a bit rambling. A good chunk of the "middle" dealt with Amy Dorrit not at all, and yet by the time she re-entered the plot her significance to the story was beyond doubt. I wonder if I wouldn't have enjoyed the final coming together of certain characters if some of those characters had not been neglected by the story-teller throughout the bulk of the third quarter.

I must admit something here - I think perhaps a scene that was intended by the author to act as the great plot-capping heart-stopping revelation was so full of convoluted Victorian hints and innuendos that its meaning was almost completely lost on my feeble twentieth-century brain. I had to re-read certain sentences several times, and still I am not quite sure what happened in the deep misty past that led to such injustice, lies, and deception in the story's present.

Here's a testament to Little Dorrit's lasting influence on popular culture:



From: http://www.cavalierclubbc.com/history.htm

********

While perusing the shelves of a Minneapolis book store, I found three collections of Dickens' Christmas Stories. Unfortunately, I didn't have the complete list of his "Christmas books" with me, so I couldn't say for sure whether these collections were comprehensive or not. All three included A Christmas Carol, which in my mind wasn't a good sign. In my uncertainty, I bought based solely on price. It turns out that I'm still a few stories short of the complete set.

I can rest assured, however, that at the pace I am proceeding of late, I will still be under the literary strictures of my Dickens monomania in December of 2010, and can attempt the acquisition of the remaining Christmas stories (The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain) for my enjoyment at that time.

For now, I am going to try and burn through The Cricket on the Hearth and The Chimes (the latter being a New Year's Eve story, and thus to be read after the former despite it's coming earlier in the chronological order - you'll have to excuse my relaxed interpretation of the rules with respect to the Christmas stories...) before January is out. Wish me luck!

S.

i haven't stopped reading

I've just stopped writing.

I've finished David Copperfield. I read Bleak House. And then I read Hard Times. And here are a few thoughts:

1. I thought I'd finally gotten tired of Dickens at the beginning of Bleak House. But then, in an unexpected turn of events, I changed teams and decided that he still makes for enjoyable time spent reading.
2. Hard Times reveals that while Dickens fully loathes the unbridled greed and power-hungry machinations of the industrial elite, he is also equally irritated by the self-righteous hypocrisy of some labour union organizers. His point is this: be honest, forthright, and noble, no matter what your station is in life.

Now it's on to the next installment in the great project: Little Dorrit. I just have to track down a copy at the library here in the new town.

Bleak House

Bleak House
Started: April 23, 2009

Purchased at the Denver, CO airport en route to Las Vegas.

And I will say this about Dickens: he just doesn't fit in beside the pool at the Wynn Las Vegas. So I was left with just swimming.

S.

final thoughts on David Copperfield

Well, that was quick. I got sucked in by the confessional, soap-opera style drama of the book, and had an obsessive need to read it at all times. And now its over, and to tell you the truth, I'm glad.

I thought the book was great. It started off all fresh and exciting, Dickens seemed to be using a different kind of writing style, and telling a different kind of story. And as the story sucked me in, the story became more comfortable and familiar. And in the end, all the loose strings were neatly tied up in a pair of classic Dickens-method final chapters. All the bad guys were suffering, all the good guys were content and peaceful.

Then I read the introduction, and lo and behold I was supposed to be disappointed with the ending! I was supposed to be let down by the fact that Dickens slipped back into more his comfortable storytelling style, where everything is simply fixed and all comes out in the wash (or a long trip to Australia, or Switzerland). Ah well, you can't please them all.

It's time for a break from Dickensian fantasies (that's what it's come to). I am not going to take the next book off the shelf for a little spell. I read too many in quick succession (at least three, maybe four) and they are getting too mixed up in my mind. So I will cleanse the palette, but NOT by breaking my own self-inflicted rules. No, I will have to think about this, but I want to choose a book that is either non-fictional but makes good bus-reading, or choose to not read books for the next while. We'll see what happens.

S.

Bursting

That's the kind of title Dickens would give to a chapter like the post I am about to write, for I am bursting with thoughts and ideas with respect to my reading. We shall see if I can get my thoughts pulled out into proper words and grammar without their tumbling around my fingers and onto the "page" in a heap.

First of all: David Copperfield is a great book. I am completely taken in.

Second: I think there was a common belief held by Charles Dickens and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Yes, you read me right. I think Charles Dickens practiced the religion of Bokononism, a religion that espouses the theory of the karass: "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons that person may be a member of your karass." What is the karass? A "team [of people] that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing." If you'd like to know more about Bokononism, pick up a copy of Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut at your local library. If you want to know more about how the same small cast of people can keep running into each-other within the crammed metropolis of Victorian London, pick up any book by Charles Dickens from the same library.

Third: There are all sorts of funny foods and drinks I keep reading about in these books, and they all make me hungry. Like - if you just woke up and someone offered to fry you up a "rasher of bacon," wouldn't that make you hungry? It makes even this vegetarian hungry. I should really keep a list, there are so many tasty foods. There are also not as appealing foods, like when someone "picks up a tongue for dinner."

Fourth: One thing Dickens never does is tell the reader the temperature. I have no idea, when the weather is described as cold or hot, what the temperature actually is, and how to compare that with my experience. You see, people seem to make due with very little insulation, either in their homes or on their person, and thus I am led to wonder why we spend so much on winter apparel. Perhaps it isn't really so cold around London as it is here on the bald prairie. But it does snow... and snow means it's cold, right? So what was going on there? Why doesn't Dickens ever write: "It was cold, like, 32 degrees or something." Of course, he would be citing Fahrenheit temperatures. Or what? I don't know! My mind boggles at the unknowns!

Fifth: What is a proctor?

Sixth: Did you know that the word flirt has been around long enough for David Copperfield to do it with a young lass named Dora?

I leave it at that for now. The pressure inside is a bit more bearable, and I can rest easy now I know that these eternal questions and ponderings have been made as indelible as I could ever wish them.

S.

Miss Trotwood, and the phrase of the day

Miss Trotwood, David Copperfield's aunt, is described as follows (and I leave it to you to draw your Victorian conclusions about her character):

My aunt [Betsy] was a tall, hard-featured lady, but by no means ill-looking. There was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice, in her gait and carriage, amply sufficient to account for the effect she had made upon a gentle creature like my mother; but her features were rather handsome than otherwise, though unbending and austere...

Janet [Betsy's attendant] was a pretty blooming girl, of about nineteen or twenty, and a perfect picture of neatness. Though I made no further observation of her at the moment, I may mention here what I did not discover until afterwards, namely, that she was one of a series of protegees whom my aunt had taken into her service expressly to educate in a renouncement of mankind, and who had generally completed their abjuration by marrying the baker.

As to the phrase of the day, it is as follows (and may be the phrase of the 19th Century, for all I know. Please let me know if you have a better one to come out of that period of 100 years):

"I was a lackadaisical young spoony."

Which is in reference to David Copperfield's being head-over-heels in love with a young woman, and spending the morning hours walking around in a state of... I don't know how to put it better than the narrator himself:

"To be allowed to call her 'Dora,' to write to her, to dote upon and worship her, to have reason to think that when she was with other people she was yet mindful of me, seemed to me the summit of human ambition - I am sure it was the summit of mine.

... bliss I suppose you'd call that. Dickens calls it "captivity." But what the... does "spoony" mean? Consulting the OED (my favorite passtime), we find that the second definition of the noun is:

One who spoons or is foolishly amorous.

And we also find these choice quotes from the musty depths of literary history:

1857 ‘C. BEDE’ Verdant Green III. iv, You don't mean to say you've been doing the spooney -- what you call making love? 1878 M. C. JACKSON Chaperon's Cares I. v. 57 Pen calls him a spoony, and ridicules him unmercifully.

So there you have it. Being a spoony's great! Being DJ Spoony must be pretty great, also!




S.