Onward Ho!

Thwack!

What’s that sound? That was my newest book purchase hitting my desk at work. I might have to rethink the time table for my “little” project.

Okay, for those who might have missed my very first post, I have decided to investigate the literature of Charles Dickens and the plan is (was?) to read all of his novels by the end of the year. Seeing as I had decided this sometime in April, and there’s 14 novels to read, I figured, no sweat, I can finish this in no time. I also plan on seeing one movie made from each novel. Still....easy, right? Since I’m a very fast reader and can read something like 10 novels in a month (when inspired to do so), how bad can it be to plan to finish this in 8 months?

Yeah, right. You see, I started with Nicholas Nickelby....all 781 glorious pages of it....in a fairly small font....on paper brown with age. It took me about 3 weeks. No matter how you look at it, it was a slog. The language is more archaic than I remembered (the only other Dickens’ novel I’ve read was Oliver Twist and that was in junior high school....a loooooong time ago), and because this was one of the original serialized works, it tends to go on and on and on and on....well, you get the picture. I must say that this novel will not be one of my favorite of Dickens’ works.

I’m currently working my way through Little Dorrit. All 860 pages of it. This was after picking up The Pickwick Papers (898 pages) and putting it back down again; I simply couldn’t tolerate more small font on bad paper, and the first pages (the minutes of the meeting which formed the Pickwick Club) were more than a little off-putting. So far I’m finding Little Dorrit a far more interesting read than Nicholas Nickleby. The difference may be that I’ve already seen the Little Dorrit film and am more acquainted with the plethora of characters that populate a book of that length.

I do acknowledge that the tiny font and bad paper are my choice. I couldn’t buy *all* of the books brand new and I did want to buy them. When I read, I tend to dog ear pages, apply post its, and put notes in the margins, especially when reading for literary critique purposes. So, all books were purchased via amazon.com as cheaply as possible. Therefore, some of these books are old. For example, The Pickwick Papers was published in 1978. I know that doesn’t sound too old, but 31 years old is very old indeed for a paperback book.

This all brings me to today’s arrival: Bleak House....989 pages. So far, it’s the longest of the lot. And keep in mind that this does NOT include Introductions, Prefaces, Afterwards, Appendices, or Notes. I guess, to be fair, I should say that not all of the books are that long. The shortest is Hard Times at a mere handful of pages: 389.

Yeah, this might take me longer than I thought.