Rainy Day Reads

A book that’s over 900 pages long can seem a bit daunting for most. But as usual with Dickens I don’t think the length is too much. The language is engaging and the story is interesting, so while the pages don’t fly by, they don’t drag on forever either. I think it really pays off in the end if you manage to forget about the page numbers.   Dickens can be a bit wordy and longwinded sometimes, but it doesn’t happen too often, I think. The wordiness usually comes out, when he is explaining some part of the world the characters inhabit, like the doings (or not-doings) of the Circumlocution Office and the social rules of the various places in the story. When the plot is developing I find the language interesting and descriptive, without being too much.  As for the plot of this book is it very intricate, as is usual for Dickens, I think. Seemingly unconnected characters come together in the end in unexpected, but not unbelievable ways. But it all begins with a man, Mr. Art...

I first got into Charles Dickens, because I watched some adaptations of his novels on TV. I believe the first one was Little Dorrit, which my friend and I watched a number of times during our 4 month Asia trip. She had bought the DVD set and a portable player and we utilized this during any down time. The series was so beautifully made that it was easily able to stand a re-watch (or many) and when we came to a bigger book store we hunted down copies of the book and started reading. And   I loved it! Charles Dickens is a bit of a hit-or-miss for me. I LOVE some of his books like “David Copperfield”, “Bleak House”, “Nicholas Nickleby" and “Little Dorrit", but some of his other most notable works I really don’t like, e.g. “A Tale of Two Cities”and “Great Expectations”.  Dickens was born in 1812, and at a young age he had to leave school to work in a factory, as his father was imprisoned for debt. Despite this lack of formal education he wrote and edited thousands of pag...