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Bleak House

Charles Dickens

Start date: April 1, 2020

Finish date: June 30, 2020

Discussion: Bleak House - April-June 2020

Why we're reading this: April to June 2020 Completist Big Read
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Bleak House - April-June 2020

Review - Bleak House
By Matthew , Assistant List Master · 4 posts · 8 views

last updated May 03, 2020 06:18AM

General Discussion - Bleak House
By Matthew , Assistant List Master · 15 posts · 12 views

last updated Apr 13, 2020 07:50AM

What Members Thought

Jun 21, 2019 Christine PNW rated it liked it · review of another edition

Whew - I have finished this 813 page book after a couple of false starts.

It's classic Dickens. I've heard it called his masterpiece, but I don't have enough experience with Dickens to weigh in on that subject. I did like it a whole lot better than Dombey and Son, but I didn't like it so well as either Great Expectations or Oliver Twist.

The last 20% was a bit of a bloodbath, though, with a murder, an attempted frame-up, and then one of those Victorian deaths where a character just up and dies of Whew - I have finished this 813 page book after a couple of false starts.

It's classic Dickens. I've heard it called his masterpiece, but I don't have enough experience with Dickens to weigh in on that subject. I did like it a whole lot better than Dombey and Son, but I didn't like it so well as either Great Expectations or Oliver Twist.

The last 20% was a bit of a bloodbath, though, with a murder, an attempted frame-up, and then one of those Victorian deaths where a character just up and dies of despair. I think my favorite character was poor Caddy Jellyby Turveydrop, although I liked all of the women in this one (Ada was kind of meh, but only because she had a whiff of Dora about her). Mrs. Jellyby is a hoot and I can certainly understand why she has become the stuff of Dickensian legend.

Anyway, Dickens is always just Dickens. His books are teeming with life, like when you're in 5th grade science class and the teacher puts a drop of pond water under a microscope so all of the kids can see all of the little amoebas and bacterium and other bits of life wriggling about. I know that he is melodramatic and that his characters more often resemble caricatures, but once I fall into a Dickens, I feel like I'm in Victorian, England, which is a place I dearly love to visit in the literary sense (don't get me wrong, I have no illusions about how awful and smelly it would've been to actually live in it).

I have to share the second paragraph in the book, because it is so fabulously Dickensian and atmospheric:

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. ...more

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Apr 02, 2020 Eileen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobook, classics, 2020, 2020-ng-group-challenge, literature

4.5 stars

How does one write a review for a book like this and do it justice? One doesn't. Or at least I don't, lol. All I can write about it what I liked about it. For most of the book, I was thinking that this book was a 4 for me, but then towards the ending I was carried along in suspense and I loved the ending. And I totally teared up over what Mr. Jarndyce did for his love of Esther. There were times when I thought of Esther, "she doth protest too much" because she was so darn good. But what ...more

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