#SAMDRAL

Every year in May I host a Dickens read-along. This will be its seventh year, if you can believe it -- thus the hashtag, Seventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. Here's what we've read so far.

2019: Tale of Two Cities
2018: Pickwick Papers
2017: Martin Chuzzlewit
2016: David Copperfield
2015: Our Mutual Friend
2014: Bleak House

I'm thinking about maybe reading The Old Curiosity Shop this year. But I'm also thinking about Oliver Twist, which is shorter with less bathos. Little Nell is not my favorite heroine, and this is not the year in which I want to haul myself through a book I don't really like. But Mr. Quilp! He might be the best Dickens villain of them all. So tell me: want to read a Dickens novel with me in May this year? Do you have a preference between Old Curiosity Shop and Oliver Twist? I will start after finals, on approximately May 8, and read about 30 pages a day. You are of course welcome to start whenever you'd like and read at a pace that works for you. Every year I aim to be done by the beginning of June, but it doesn't always work out that way.

Between now and then I have a little deck-clearing to do. I have one more chapter in Anne Tyler's newest book, Redhead by the Side of the Road. I borrowed Dear Edward from the e-library based on a friend's recommendation. I was rereading Blackout/All Clear but I got bogged down about a hundred pages from the end -- I'd like to finish instead of just re-shelving it, even though I know what happens. And I bought Jen Fulwiler's new book. I started to say, "I can get those read between now and the 8th of May, don't you think?" -- but probably three out of four is more realistic. If my lone leisure-time activity right now were reading, I could finish them all, no problem. But the kids and I are doing lots of logic puzzles together and I am back in the Duolingo groove and also I am hoping to finish knitting a blanket before the weather gets too hot. So let's say three out of four.

And then! To London! Squalor and heartbreak and poverty and hopeful glimpses of the countryside and pollution and uncertainty and mysterious death but always, always redemption in the end. Whenever I am tempted to get impatient with Dickens over his implausible plot twists and one-dimensional female characters, I remember the redemption in the end and sigh a happy sigh.