It's #SAMDRAL time, friends! Today is the beginning of the Seventh Annual May Dickens Read-Along, and this year's book is Oliver Twist. Start your engines!
I couldn't find our physical copy of the book. I have a Kindle Dickens compendium, but I don't love using it. It's just so big that the navigation is clunky and the mileposts are meaningless. You are at location 116738 of 11167934, it tells me. So I downloaded a free version of Oliver Twist in the Kindle store, and I dove in.
First the author bio raised my eyebrows. It said, "Charles John Huffam Dickens pen-call 'Boz,' become the foremost English novelist of the Victorian technology, as well as a full of life social campaigner."
"Huh," I thought to myself as I turned to chapter 1, "those are not words that usually go in a row."
"...Wait a minute," I said to myself approximately one paragraph into Chapter 1, "this is not right." On page 2 the physician attending Oliver's birth is alleged to have said to his mother, "Oh, you should not now talk approximately dying but." It gets worse from there.
I'm trying to figure this out. Did someone take a translation of Oliver Twist, run it through Google Translate to put it back into an approximation of English, and then post it in the Kindle store? Is it Oliver Twist for denizens of the Uncanny Valley? It has that same sort of almost-but-not-quite feel.
Luckily there is more than one free Kindle edition, and the next one I found appears to be have been written by Dickens himself and not his AI counterpart.
So! To the workhouse we go! Maternal mortality and child labor and food insecurity -- how's that for a cheerful beginning? The next time my children complain that the WiFi is too slow for them, I'll say, "Hey, at least you're not an ORPHAN picking OAKUM in the WORKHOUSE."
I'm sure that will fill them with a spirit of gratitude, aren't you?
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