All righty, friends, it's going to be fairly painful here for the next few days. The thing about grading big batches of student writing is that there's always plagiarism somewhere. I thought I had been SO careful about making sure I wouldn't be dealing with plagiarism in finals week, but it seems to be inevitable. So! When you are being walloped in the face with the very worst part of your job, do you say to yourself, "a nice fat Dickens novel would make me feel so much better right now"? Because I do.
Let's read Little Dorrit together!
We can go to the south of France in fiction, even if we can't go there in reality. We can discuss whether Little Dorrit is a believable character or not, and why Dickens was so determined that his female lead characters would be mostly meek. We can also talk about the least meek mother in all of Dickens, and the 19th-century fictional predecessor of a 21st-century criminal who just appeared in the obit pages. We can return to the Marshalsea debtors' prison, which we haven't visited since we read Pickwick a few years ago.
I am going to start on Monday and read about 40 pages a day. If you get a free Kindle version, take a careful look at the first paragraph before you dive in. It should say, "Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since." I am telling you this because I downloaded a free Kindle version of Oliver Twist last year and I wondered briefly if I had slid into Looking Glass World. I think someone must have plugged the Project Gutenberg version into some kind of translation software twice -- so that it was rendered automatically into Dutch (or something) and then back into English -- and uploaded the resulting bowl of not-quite-word-salad to the Kindle store.
I have been reading Cal Newport's A World Without Email for weeks now, and the ratio of interesting to dull is less than favorable. It's partly that there's too much business-speak for my taste, and partly that the changes he is suggesting seem likely to meet with a lot of resistance and I'm tired right now. But I am going to FINISH IT, because Little Dorrit awaits. I have also been reading This is Happiness, which I am finding pleasant but not especially riveting. I am going to FINISH IT TOO, because Little Dorrit awaits.
Wouldn't you like to escape into Victorian England for a little while? Join me!
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