Bleak House in On Paths Unknown

Jan 13, 2017 Kamakana rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: aa-englandlit, aa-europelit, historicity, xlong-over-400, comic-satire, zz1840-1859, victorianish, literature, xxlong-over-800, dickens-charles

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130117: this is a later later addition: as a reading project i have read several dickens this year, as follows:

this is a later addition: i watched the most recent bbc miniseries of this book. yes i guess this was 'telenovela' before tv was even created. this is certainly not a sedate, literary, treatment, but zips along. the story is there- perhaps too much brought forward- and the characters all defined, given, cast well. on th ...more

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Nov 11, 2016 Jonathan rated it liked it · review of another edition

a bit too melodramatic and telenovela-esque for me, though it may be I just wasn't in the right mood. I think the fact that I did not give a crap about the characters or the plot twists probably did not help. ...more

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May 23, 2016 Gaijinmama rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, classics

I echo several other reviews when I say that this book took me three months to read, but it was definitely worth it. I love Dickens' descriptions, and all the weird, hilarious minor characters he created. I disagree with most, however, in that I truly came to dislike Esther, the only character who speaks to us directly. Everyone seems to love her, but she got on my nerves. Don't hate me, friends. I'm just expressing my opinion about a great work of literature. I know, I know, this is a classic o ...more

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Jan 30, 2011 J. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: five-star, this-england, the-real-charles-dickens

Rather than cobble a review of a classic, here's the first two paragraphs :

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes Rather than cobble a review of a classic, here's the first two paragraphs :

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds...

Thoroughly, methodically-- if not meticulously-- lovely, sublime; precise and yet characteristically circumspect & perverse .... a knockout, not a jot more or less.
Take it to a desert island, laugh it up at the passing years.

...more

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