Who else is reading Oliver Twist with me, or planning to start it? I am a little past the one-third mark. Oliver and Bill Sykes have just set out on their mysterious expedition. Bill has a loaded pistol in his pocket, and Oliver has been warned that he faces death at Bill's hands if he speaks a word.
The relationship between Bill and Nancy is striking me this time through the book. Nancy is an interesting character: more intelligent and more perceptive than a lot of Dickens women, but also thoroughly mired in her underworld life. How did she wind up with Bill? Was he less repulsive, once upon a time? Maybe human trafficking hasn't changed much across the last 150 years.
If Nicole the Victorian literature scholar is reading this, maybe she'll chime in: I'm intrigued but also annoyed by Dickens' apparent conviction that good blood trumps good breeding. I posted a bit about this when we read Bleak House -- I just don't find Esther's goodness persuasive. How could she be such a sunshiny kid after such a terrible upbringing? The same thing is true for Oliver. How would he know what's right? Why would he be motivated to do the right thing in these circumstances? Dickens seems to be saying "We must have pity on the poor! Let's send them some kids from rich families to show them how to be better."
Tell me what you're enjoying, or what you're annoyed by! If you haven't started, jump on in. Oliver Twist is shorter and faster-paced than the other AMDRAL novels have been, so there's plenty of time to finish it before June. Or if you're reading something else because Dickens isn't your cup of tea (I'm looking at you, Tracy!), tell me what's on your bedside table these days.
Wait, somehow I missed the selection announcement! I'll have to go off to Gutenberg and get myself a copy.... So yes planning to read with; no, haven't read a page.
Posted by: mandamum | May 16, 2020 at 08:56 PM
I’ve also found Oliver’s “good” blood’s effects eye-rollingly annoying (even his diction is well-bred, workhouse child though he is!) But I think (as with Esther) Dickens is trying to make a case against the stigma of illegitimacy, which he keeps reminding us doesn’t mark these children for sin from birth. So even though they have solidly middle-class parents, both Oliver and Esther would (Dickens argues, wrongly) have seemed to many of those around them like they had ‘bad’ blood (think of Shakespeare’s villainous bastard Edmund).
Posted by: Nicole | May 16, 2020 at 11:20 PM
Hey! I never said Dickens wasn't my cup of tea! I have enjoyed many, strike that. a lot, strike that too. Okay, I have enjoyed a few of his books. Just because I have failed to make it beyond chapter 2 of Bleak House... in how many years? and yes, I have kept trying occasionally.... but it's so BORING. And run-on sentence-y.
I'll have you know that when you said Oliver Twist, I thought that sounds interesting. I wonder how different it will be from the musical and the non-musical films of it. And so far, it has been interesting. We've just met Jack Dawkins and he's talking about his friend the respectable old gentleman. (somewhere in ch 8...).
I am not officially reading along with you... because we know how well that went on last time I was all official about it!
Posted by: Tracy | May 17, 2020 at 10:34 PM
Also, I just finished The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson, about the first year that Churchill was prime minister. I liked it. I also liked reading about leaders who actually thought about what to do in a time of trouble.
I'm not reading much current fiction. I started a novel about a women who was time travelling through her own life (?) can't remember the title. Seems ok, but I just couldn't take the disconnect right now. I am reading a lot of non-fiction, some old fluff that I've read before, and now Oliver Twist. I am also reading about enneagrams and trying to understand what value they may have. So there's my nightstand.
Posted by: Tracy | May 17, 2020 at 10:46 PM
An uncertain number of years ago, I looked at my every-increasing TBR pile of adult fiction, and thought about my ongoing inadequacies in staying up to date with children's books (a nontrivial concern for a children's librarian), and made an executive decision: now I only read books by women authors. It's not 100%, because the women in my book club don't follow that rule, and it's only adult fiction, not children's books. But that's my deal: #readmorewomen
So, alas, I will probably never read Dickens or Trollope, but let me know if you ever read Eliot or Gaskell. I still haven't read The Mill on the Floss. And I don't remember any of the details of Middlemarch.
Posted by: Jody | May 23, 2020 at 08:34 AM