The Pickwick Club discussion
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Hard Times
Hard Times
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Reading Schedule, and Preliminaries
Sounds great Tristam. Thank you for facilitating. Glad to be aboard.
TristramA " dose of Dickens." What a wonderful way to begin the New Year.
I look forward to our reading experiment.
Thanks, Tristram - I'm looking forward to it!Here is the calendar for those of us who prefer the other format:
Hard Times, 2016
1/1 - 1/6: Part I, Chapters 1-3
1/7 - 1/13: Part I, Chapters 4-5
1/14 - 1/20: Part I, Chapter 6
1/21 - 1/27: Part I, Chapters 7-8
1/28 - 2/3: Part I, Chapters 9-10
2/4 - 2/10: Part I, Chapters 11-12
2/11 - 2/17: Part I, Chapters 13 - 14
2/18 - 2/24: Part I, Chapters 15-16
2/25 - 3/2: Part II, Chapters 1-5
3/3 - 3/9: Part II, Chapters 6-10
3/10 - 3/16: Part II, Chapters 11-12
3/17 - 3/23: Part III, Chapters 1-5
3/24 - 3/30: Part III, Chapters 6-9
Even though I've missed out on Bleak House and really wanted to do all the books in order, I will make a start with you on Hard Times. Although, when the new school year starts, I'm not sure how I'll go, but we can always see. The usual schedule should give me a good chance of keeping up!My Mum started reading this book, years ago, and gave up after the first chapter because it was "so depressing", although I doubt anything can be as depressing as Florence losing her mother in Dombey and Son.
I look forward to this slow reading. I've often wondered how the serial format worked for original readers, and the slow pace will give me a chance to simultaneously read some other things on my list. Sounds perfect. :-)
It's fine with me Tristram, although if Linda hadn't come along and reposted the schedule in the normal way, I once again would have had no idea what you were talking about. ;-)Thanks Linda. :-)
Lol. You're welcome Kim. :)
Still, it's easier to understand than ounces, pounds, inches, yards and all that non-metrical folderol ;-)
Indeed. That's why all those conversion calculators exist on the web. I've finally got it in my head that a kilometer is close enough to three-fifths of a mile to convert in my head. A seminal moment.
Doing maths while driving a car can be rather trying: I always wonder whether I'm actually speeding or proving to be a major road encumbrance when I am driving a car in the UK and assume, for the sake of simplifying matters, that 100 kilometres per hour are actually 50 miles per hour.
Tristram wrote: "Doing maths while driving a car can be rather trying: I always wonder whether I'm actually speeding or proving to be a major road encumbrance when I am driving a car in the UK and assume, for the s..."I'm tempted to ask if 100 kilometres is close to 50 miles per hour but it's too math related for me.
Oh, by the way, the last few weeks I have a terrible time doing anything here on goodreads. Trying to post anything here takes me so long now, that unless it's important I don't bother. It was taking me so long to type this message I just went off line, typed it up as a note and pasted this here. Sometimes I can type in the comment box just fine, but not usually. It just won't do it. A few letters will appear then it will start skipping letters or just stop altogether. Here's a sample of what a sentence would look like if I typed normally and didn't keep going back to correct things:
Every who down in whoville lied hristmas a lot but the grinchwho lived just north of Wt the Grinhated Christmas the whole Christmas season ohlease don't ask why no one q knows the reason.
See what I mean? What I want to know and can't figure out is, is something wrong with the site or with my computer? Any ideas? It's driving me crazy.
That's odd, Kim. It seems I've been experiencing longer page loads on Goodreads lately, but I haven't had the problem with typing that you noted.
62 MPH. A post of any length I write first in a pages document and then copy and paste. My problem is the size of the typing box.
Me too, but now I have to do it for every little sentence. Like this one. Thanks for the miles per hour thing.....I think. :-)
Tristram wrote: "Doing maths while driving a car can be rather trying: I always wonder whether I'm actually speeding or proving to be a major road encumbrance when I am driving a car in the UK and assume, for the s..."You need a newer car. Mine speedometer shows both mph and kph, mph in white on the outside of the circle and kph in red on the inside. So whether I'm driving in the US or in Canada, I can avoid those speeding tickets (which is increasingly important to me; I have over 50 years of driving without so much as a parking ticket. No tickets, citations, or even warnings of any kind. And yes, I drive a fair amount, and used to drive a lot more when I lived in a place where you could drive more than ten miles without having to take a ferry. I plan to die ticketless.
Kim wrote: "Every who down in whoville lied hristmas a lot but the grinchwho lived just north of Wt the Grinhated Christmas the whole Christmas season ohlease don't ask why no one q knows the reason."Well, of course you've had trouble typing that. You're dissing the Grinch, and the universe doesn't like that, so it punishes you. As it should.
See, I can type "I Love the Grinch, he's the epitome of all that is good and noble in the world" and have no problem at all.
Like Linda, I have got the impression that recently it has taken a bit longer for the GR site to upload but that's about the only problem I had with GR up to now. I have never experienced problems using the input fields here but then, like Xan, I only use them for shorter messages and comments. Whenever I write a book review, a longer private message or the chapter recaps for our discussion threads, I invariably type them as Word documents, save them and then do paste and copy. Not only do I find the input field too small for longer posts but I also am afraid of losing the fruit of my labour by pressing a wrong key, which has already happened once or twice. Harm is usually not as great when the document is written in Word because every five minutes, there is the auto-save function.As to speeding tickets, I usually don't get them because I never speed. As I do need my driver's license, I'm not very inclined to risk it by speeding. And the idea of causing an accident through speeding would be horrible to me. Parking tickets, however, are another thing: I regard the whole thing as a game of luck. Out of 30 times of not paying parking fees, you will probably get a ticket once, which will still leave you with a positive balance of money saved. The other day I got a ticket and when I told the ticket warden that sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you, she said, "But it's annoying, after all."
"Not really", I replied. "This time you won, and next time, maybe I will."
"But still", she insisted, "if you had put your parking disc into the window, you could have avoided it. So it's annoying, isn't it?"
"No", I said. "I forgot using the parking disc, and now it's water under the bridge."
"But you could have spent the money on better things. So all in all, it's annoying."
At that point I looked at her and said, "Shouldn't it actually be the other way round? I mean with my making a fuss about losing 10 Euros and you trying to calm me down? There is really nothing you can do to annoy me, it being such a nice day and you just doing your job."
Driving away, merrily waving at her and she giving me that Clint Eastwood look, I really thought that maybe I should have pretended to be a bit angry in order to have given her the feeling of doing her job right. Maybe my not being annoyed actually annoyed her - and that's why I'm even happier about not having been annoyed.
I used to work where the only parking close to the site was at parking meters. Every two hours I would have to go out and plug another quarter or two into the meter. Well, work is work, and I would get lost in it, and soon I owed over $200 in fines. So I moved to a parking garage much further away and paid a monthly fee. Cheaper in the long run. This was in Las Vegas some time back, and Vegas at that time didn't have anything resembling a public transportation system.I received my first speeding ticket in over 20 years a couple of months back. Hey, when you're speeding you're speeding. Pay up. But there is something about being caught by a camera connected to a server downtown and then receiving a letter instructing me to go online to pay that's seems unfair and impersonal. I mean I never had the chance to annoy the person giving me the ticket.
Tristram wrote: "Whenever I write a book review, a longer private message or the chapter recaps for our discussion threads, I invariably type them as Word documents, save them and then do paste and copy. "No kidding. So do I. It's still annoying to now have to do it for every little sentence I type, but I'll look at it like getting a speeding ticket and try not to get annoyed by it. :-)
Looking forward to Hard Times! Thanks Tristram ~ and also to Linda for putting them in the other format.I love the serialization idea! A taste of the original. After all, as GK Chesterton has it:
"In the days when Dickens's work was coming out in serial, people talked as if real life were itself the interlude between one issue of 'Pickwick' and another..."
Here's to a year of as small an interlude as possible. Cheers, Pickwickians, and Happy New Year!
Tristram wrote: "Dear Pickwickians,
We have well advanced in our Dickens explorations and have now come to an unusually short novel, which was published in weekly instalments rather than in monthly ones.
In sugg..."
Indeed, Rachel, it's one of the things that one tends to forget, namely that Dickens, and maybe other Victorian writers who wrote in instalments, were the precursors of telenovelas. What high-quality telenovelas Victorians had in their day and age.
Silly me has left my book at home. I'm on a hiking trip at the moment and will post my comments when I get back. I'll look forward to adding my comments soon.
Kate wrote: "Silly me has left my book at home. I'm on a hiking trip at the moment and will post my comments when I get back. I'll look forward to adding my comments soon."Since you obviously have access to the Internet, you could read it on Gutenberg if you wanted to!
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/786/78...
The prodigal returns. Already playing catch-up. I hope that I don't fall too far behind. I read this some time ago. I can't remember a thing about it, only that I have a vague feeling that I wasn't too taken with it. I've a feeling though that reading it again with this group may be to its advantage and mine.Hello again to all you lovely people. Hello and welcome to those 'new' people. When I say 'new', you've probably been here for ages! :p
Hello Hilary!! Again, welcome back. We can play catch-up together (I think we have done this together before? lol.). I've read week one, but am now behind on reading all the comments to go with and reading week two.
Everyman wrote: "you could read it on Gutenberg"FYI, there's also this great website: online-literature.com
It has a great selection of public domain stuff, as well as chapter summaries in many cases.
Mary Lou wrote: "Everyman wrote: "you could read it on Gutenberg"FYI, there's also this great website: online-literature.com
.."
Yes, that's a good site.
There are several others, too, most with slightly different selections of texts:
https://openlibrary.org/
https://archive.org/
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/
http://gutenberg.net.au/
http://www.forgottenbooks.com/
Perhaps my favorite go-to site when I need a book that might not be on Gutenberg is
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
it doesn't directly offer books, but it is a meta-search engine that looks at many other free e-book sites.
Hilary wrote: "The prodigal returns. Already playing catch-up. I hope that I don't fall too far behind. I read this some time ago. I can't remember a thing about it, only that I have a vague feeling that I wasn't..."Again, welcome back Hilary! My last reading of Hard Times dates back at least two decades, and that's why I am sure that I will see it in a different light today than I did last time. After all, I have matured, or at least grown older and will no longer identify with the young characters. I noticed this change when I read King Lear some while ago: Suddenly I can understand the old monarch better than I used to. That does not mean to say, however, that this time I will root for Gradgrind or Bounderby, but maybe I'll not be so harsh on them altogether - okay, I will be on Bounderby, though.
Everyman wrote: "Mary Lou wrote: "Everyman wrote: "you could read it on Gutenberg"FYI, there's also this great website: online-literature.com
.."
Yes, that's a good site.
There are several others, too, most wi..."
Thank you, Everyman, that's a very helpful list!
Thanks you Mary Lou and Everyman. I've bookmarked them all.
Oops, I realise that by commenting again here, it may have looked as though I was fishing for more welcomes. Oh dear ...Haha Linda, I think that the duo (?) read of the most estimable Don Quixote is forever emblazoned on my brain!
Your comment about the characters, Tristram, made me realise how I have TOTALLY forgotten this book. Now though I feel motivated to find out who these characters are and why I should or should not like them. Thank you. :-)
Tristram wrote: "After all, I have matured, or at least grown older"Hmm...I wonder what you were like before.
Kim wrote: "Tristram wrote: "After all, I have matured, or at least grown older"Hmm...I wonder what you were like before."
He was that disgusting goody-two-shoes who made those like me who ignored homework to go out and play sandlot baseball or football until it was too dark to see the ball look bad. His was the hand always shooting up in class with the right answer, and the one who volunteered for everything the teacher wanted a volunteer for.
Thank goodness he's changed. I really didn't like him back then!
Everyman wrote: "Kate wrote: "Silly me has left my book at home. I'm on a hiking trip at the moment and will post my comments when I get back. I'll look forward to adding my comments soon."Since you obviously hav..."
Thanks for the link Everyman. Even though I should be of this technological age, I can only enjoy reading books. It's not the same, reading online. I miss the feel of a book.
Kate wrote: "Thanks for the link Everyman. Even though I should be of this technological age, I can only enjoy reading books. It's not the same, reading online. I miss the feel of a book. ."I admit that I don't enjoy reading online that much, either, but when a book is hard to find, it's often the best alternative.
I have adapted well to my e-readers, though. I have both Kindle and Nook and find them almost as satisfying as real books, especially for reading in bed where they're lighter and easier for me to handle than hardbound books (which I greatly prefer to paperbacks).
Kim wrote: "Tristram wrote: "After all, I have matured, or at least grown older"Hmm...I wonder what you were like before."
I was an enchanting, most ravishing child before I became a morose teenager and a sarcastic adult.
Everyman wrote: "Kim wrote: "Tristram wrote: "After all, I have matured, or at least grown older"Hmm...I wonder what you were like before."
He was that disgusting goody-two-shoes who made those like me who ignor..."
No, I was the one who regularly got messages for my parents for reading novels under my desk in class, and the one who would regularly ask my Maths teacher in what real-life situation one could possibly need fractures, and - yes - the one who always tried to shirk Sports lessons.
I prefer the experience of holding a real book in my hands, too, but lately I have discoverd the joys of a Kindle reader - only that I mark so many passages that it becomes difficult, after a while, to navigate between these passages and find what I really want to find. Reading from the computer screen, though, is definitely not my cup of tea, and I could never read a whole novel online.
Tristram wrote: "Kim wrote: "Tristram wrote: "After all, I have matured, or at least grown older"Hmm...I wonder what you were like before."
I was an enchanting, most ravishing child before I became a morose teen..."
Me too.
Tristram wrote: "No, I was the one who regularly got messages for my parents for reading novels under my desk in class,"Me too.
the one who would regularly ask my Maths teacher in what real-life situation one could possibly need fractures,
There isn't one.
Tristram wrote: "Reading from the computer screen, though, is definitely not my cup of tea, and I could never read a whole novel online."Is there a difference? Just being on the computer long enough to read all this gives me a horrendous headache - more of one than I had in the first place - I always assumed a Kindle would do the same thing. I couldn't find Hard Times when we started so I was reading it here on the computer and I almost went mad. I finally found it, it was in a hill in the living room village so now I'm back to normal. :-)
Tristram wrote: "the one who would regularly ask my Maths teacher in what real-life situation one could possibly need fractures,"Must be a German term. I taught Maths for a number of years, and never heard of fractures.
If you mean fractions, though, even Goodreads depends on them.
Tristram wrote: "I was an enchanting, most ravishing child"I'm not sure whether this answer affects the grump contest, but I'm quite sure it affects the honesty contest! :)
Everyman wrote: "Tristram wrote: "I was an enchanting, most ravishing child"I'm not sure whether this answer affects the grump contest, but I'm quite sure it affects the honesty contest! :)"
That gets you one.
Yes, that's what I understand, Lindsay. Hope I'm right!
Lindsay wrote: "am I reading schedule right, only one chapter (6) this week???"Hi Lindsay
Yes, just one chapter this week. For the first few weeks of our study of Hard Times we are reading the as it originally appeared in the weekly publication Household Words. Hopefully, we will get some of the feeling of reading it just as the Victorians experienced it.
I find it very tempting to peek ahead.
Hilary wrote: "Yes, that's what I understand, Lindsay. Hope I'm right! "Yes, that's right. We're reading it - Part I anyway, the way it was published originally. Why Dickens only published one chapter this week I'm not sure, I didn't look at it that close yet, it may be just as long as two chapters in other sections. When we get to Part II we're going back to something closer to our regular reading schedule which is usually around 50 pages a week, or around 5 chapters. I think so anyway, if I'm wrong I hope Tristram lets us know.
We have well advanced in our Dickens explorations and have now come to an unusually short novel, which was published in weekly instalments rather than in monthly ones.
In suggesting the following reading schedule, I am resorting to an idea offered by Peter, namely that of, at least partly, re-experiencing what it was like for readers to reading the novel as it was published at the time. The novel is divided in three major parts, and for the first part, we could actually read on a weekly basis just those chapters that were published during one week, just to find out what it might have been like for Dickens's contemporaries. Kim provided me with an overview of how the chapters were originally published. As for the other two parts, I tried to divide the chapters in a way that gives us our accustomed 40 to 50 pages a week.
This procedure would lead us to the following schedule:
[Dates according to European standards]
01/01 - 06/01: Part I, Chapters 1-3
07/01 - 13/01: Part I, Chapters 4-5
14/01 - 20/01: Part I, Chapter 6
21/01 - 27/01: Part I, Chapters 7-8
28/01 - 03/02: Part I, Chapters 9-10
04/02 - 10/02: Part I, Chapters 11-12
11/02 - 17/02: Part I, Chapters 13 - 14
18/02 - 24/02: Part I, Chapters 15-16
From here on, I tied up more chapters than were originally published for one week in order to give us our usual dose of Dickens - but I still respected the cut between Parts II and III.
25/02 - 02/03: Part II, Chapters 1-5
03/03 - 09/03: Part II, Chapters 6-10
10/03 - 16/03: Part II, Chapters 11-12
17/03 - 23/03: Part III, Chapters 1-5
24/03 - 30/03: Part III, Chapters 6-9
Chapters recaps will usually be done on Sundays, with the possible exception of the first reading bit - because I will have some guests staying over the weekend and therefore write my summaries on Monday. This is a lot of time over a comparatively short book, but re-experiencing the original reading speed at least for the first part might be an interesting thing. What do you think?