Bleak House

Yeah, I know - two posts in one day. But the Child has calmed down and it seemed a good time to do it.

So, I've been reading Bleak House for, I dunno, EVER. Damn, that is one LONG piece of classic literature. I got interested in reading it because of Stephen King and Peter Straub's Black House - the two 'heroes' of the tale are Jack Saywer, now grown from the pre-adolescent we met last in The Talisman, retired from police work and now spending much of his free time with his friend Henry, to whom he begins reading Bleak House aloud in the evenings over a glass of good wine. I've read some Dickens in the past, always have loved A Christmas Carol and thought I should probably venture into the classics again - it's been a while.

Uff da. Now I know what Virginia Woolf meant when she reportedly said, "Dickens makes his books blaze up not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire." There's a hell of a lot of people to keep straight in the thing, not to mention the barrier of dialect and, frankly, the distracted state of my reading these days (I don't have time to actually study the stuff I'm reading). But in the end I'm glad to have made the attempt nonetheless. It's a work of staggering length, but a worthy one at that, especially regarding the relationships between Esther Summerson, Mr. Jarndyce, and Ada and Richard Carstone. Will I read it again? Probably - but not for some time.

Now it's on to a new project - I'm going to try some of the books from the BBC Big Read list of a few years ago. First on the list is Midnight's Children, the first novel by Salman Rushdie. I note that it's much lighter than Bleak House; let's hope I finish it sooner as well.