Light and Momentary

#NAMDRAL, the countdown

Okay, heads up! There are only four weeks -- 28 short days -- until the Ninth Annual May Dickens Read-Along commences. This year we are going to read Nicholas Nickleby. I am going to start on May 10, right after I submit grades. We will be overlapping with the Hardcore Dickens Club, which should be fun. (They are starting a week later and taking it more slowly, so the overlap is imperfect but will still mean lots of interesting conversations.)

If you haven't read Nicholas Nickleby, you should join us. It's a fun one -- lots of lighthearted bits, easy on the bathos. If you have already read Nicholas Nickleby -- well, OF COURSE you want to reread it, don't you? What better way to spend your leisure time in the merry month of May?

So if you have TBR lists that need adjusting or decks that need clearing or any of that kind of business to take care of, this is your cue to get rolling. If you might appreciate a little encouragement, I have two old posts on how to read Dickens and another on why.

Snails and Pattens

I've told you before that one of the things I love about a long-haul in-depth reading project is the opportunity to get thoroughly acquainted with an author's voice: the snails in Shakespeare, the echoes across Dickens novels. I was reading Sketches by Boz when I said to myself, "Hey, wait a minute, that sounds like Sairey Gamp!" The midwife who comes to attend a birth is described as "a fat old woman, in a cloak and night-cap, with a bundle in one hand, and a pair of pattens in the other, who looked as if she had been suddenly knocked up out of bed for some very special purpose."

Yesterday I looked it up and sure enough, Sairey Gamp, on her first appearance in Martin Chuzzlewit, is described as "a fat old woman, this Mrs Gamp." When she emerged after Mr. Pecksniff knocked on her window, Dickens says, she "had a large bundle with her, a pair of pattens, and a species of gig umbrella." I didn't know what pattens were until I encountered them in Dickens, but the description is evocative -- a woman preparing herself to trudge across mud and sewage without tracking them into a home that will be welcoming a new baby. 

In Sketches Dickens describes himself as a young bachelor, uncertain about the import of the fat old woman's arrival. He was only 24 when it was published. I wonder how much she is based on an actual 1830s London midwife, awakened by a midnight knock, hurrying out with her hands full. I wonder too how much Dickens based his description on the anti-midwifery stereotypes that were brewing even then -- I don't think I'd want Sairey Gamp as a birth attendant, personally.

I remember reading an interview with Liz Phair in which she talked about her first recordings as a library. "I go in there and rip stuff off," she said. I am curious about whether Sketches is something similar -- an early exploration of characters and ideas that will resurface in later works. It might be a little weird to compare the person who wrote Supernova with a person who couldn't bring himself to write the word "childbirth*," but maybe it's true that the creative process works in similar ways regardless of what's being created.

*Check out this piece of circumlocution: "Mrs Gamp had been up all the previous night, in attendance upon a ceremony to which the usage of gossips has given that name which expresses, in two syllables, the curse pronounced on Adam." It's got to be childbirth, right? What else could it be?

I am the soul of temperance, it turns out

You guys, I have to tell you about a thing I found on the internet today. Have you ever thought to yourself, "That Jamie Gladly is kind of obsessed with the Victorians"? It turns out I am not obsessed at all! Not even a teeny bit.

Today I found a corner of the internet in which dozens of people -- dozens! (dozens as in 2 and a bit, but still: dozens, plural) -- are planning to read the major works of Dickens across the next two years.

That is a gobsmacking commitment to Dickens, my friends. That is SO MUCH DICKENS.

And maybe, possibly, I will take part of the ride with them.

For a while now I have wanted to read some portion of the Dickens I haven't yet read. The problems are that (a) there's so much Dickens and (b) I have found the quality variable in my few excursions beyond the novels. The Christmas novellas, for instance-- bathos! sentimentality! blargh!! 

The club members are reading in roughly chronological order, starting with Sketches by Boz, which I have never read. I love the exuberance and playfulness of early Dickens (Pickwick forever!), so that might be a good one to read with them. I'll sit out the next two on their list (Pickwick and Oliver Twist), since I've read both of those pretty recently, but they are going to be starting Nicholas Nickleby in May. Perfect timing for an #AMDRAL pick, and I haven't read that one since 2010, when I finished up my 10-year Dickens project.

I finished up Eustace Diamonds over lunch today and started Phineas Redux tonight. I don't think I've ever had a Dickens work and a Trollope novel on the go at the same time, but I guess I'll give it a whirl.

A few more thoughts about Little Dorrit

I found Little Dorrit unexpectedly painful to read, because the society scenes left me wincing every time. "Save yourselves!" I wanted to shout at the characters, but of course they could not hear me and would not have heeded me even if they could. It reminded me strongly of Our Mutual Friend -- I feel certain that the Veneerings would have frequented the Merdles' dinner parties.

In my last post about the book I said I must have skipped over a 5-page chunk of text inadvertently in my hugely pregnant state, but it was actually a bigger block than that. There are two chapters that I do not remember at all, not in the slightest. And they're important chapters. The good news is that I finished the book with far fewer questions this time around, but the bad news is that I'm still scratching my head about what happened in 2002. Maybe I moved the bookmark to my target page, nodded off in the first of the two forgotten chapters, and thought the next day that I should start reading at the bookmark? Maybe I was so tired at the end of one day that my eyes passed over the words but my oh-so-pregnant brain failed to comprehend them? I will never know, I guess. But! I'm glad I filled in those gaps! Sometimes Dickens is elliptical, but two chapters' worth of big revelations would be a lot to elide.

I found the book's portrayal of the costs of wealth to be unexpectedly timely. We still don't believe that the love of money is the root of all evil, right? Maybe we ask ourselves: who could help loving money? Money buys freedom! I still shudder a little, though, thinking about the the ways that money imprisons some of the Little Dorrit characters. After I finished the book I felt an urgent need to catch up on charitable giving for the year. I got everything all squared away through the end of May and still felt unsettled, so I proceeded with the June giving as well.

Generally I've found that I uncover more to enjoy in a Dickens novel the second time through. Even though I'm glad I read Little Dorrit last month, I wouldn't really say that I enjoyed it. Lots to think about, less to delight in. Not my favorite May Dickens Read-Along, but at least I know now what Mr. Clennam wanted to remember!

One mystery revealed

Near the end of Little Dorrit there is an unusually long chapter in which some of the secrets that have puzzled us from the beginning are uncovered. And you guys, I don't know exactly what happened when I read this book in 2002, but I seem to have skipped over a key 5-page section. I must have thought I was on p. 757 when I heaved my hugely pregnant self up to resolve that poorly-timed sibling squabble, but I was actually on p. 752. "This looks right," I must have said to myself when I sat back down later that day, but it was NOT RIGHT, not at all.

I remember finishing the book and thinking, "Huh, there are a lot of things that still seem unclear here," because I DIDN'T READ pp. 752-757!

The more Dickens I have read, the more I have seen that his books reward careful attention. I have been meticulous this time through -- when did Character A talk to Character B? How does Character C know Character D? I didn't want to get to the end and feel uncertain this time. But I didn't need to be taking notes on their offhand conversations in 2021 -- I just needed a bookmark in 2002!

To the list of tips I have shared in the past for enjoying Dickens, I can now add another: it's better if you read all of the pages. So helpful, I know.

Biting my nails on page 568

Do you ever re-read a book and ask yourself, "Did I notice that before?" This is happening to me with Little Dorrit.

Dickens is making a particular point, it seems to me, of saying that you don't have to be incarcerated to be imprisoned: age and debility are their own prison for Mrs. Clennam; unforgiveness, ditto, for Mrs. C and for Miss Wade. The "surfaces" that Mrs. General implores Little Dorrit to create will become a cage, if she succeeds in heeding her companion's advice; we see it in every society scene. Even Mr. Merdle looks in vain for a place in his home to be out of the butler-warden's view. But I am not sure I connected those dots last time.

I joked in my first post about the first chapter's warning regarding Blandois/Rigaud's villainy, but it seems to me this time through that Dickens is pulling out all of the stops: this guy is a really-for-real seriously bad dude, he says. Beware, gentle reader! I am certain I did not have as much sympathy for Gowan's dog on my first reading, but this time through I am making horrified faces even as I remember enough to write this post.

"Why are you making that face?" Joe asked me as I was reading earlier this evening, and it was another horrified sympathy face. I did not remember how many of our friends were drawn into the scam that will shortly be exposed. I am already anticipating the shock and the loss that they will experience. Perhaps this time it is more resonant because there is such a prominent real-world example in recent memory.

Little Dorrit is the Dickens novel which left me with the most questions, but I did not go searching for answers because I was 7,654,238 months pregnant when I finished it and greatly distracted by the sensation of having accidentally swallowed a hippopotamus bent on kicking his way out of my abdomen. I'm curious about whether this time through will leave me with a clearer sense of where he was trying to take us. I'll let you know if I have more insight this time around. Or if I accidentally swallow a hippopotamus.

Little Dorrit, Day 1

You know how you can tell Monsieur Rigaud is a villain and not an innocent wrongly imprisoned? His hair is streaked with red, that's how. Redheads in Dickens are nothing but trouble. Beware the redhead! [says the redhead]

I do not remember anything at all about Miss Ware from my first reading of Little Dorrit, but I will bet you twenty American dollars that we see her again. She's too tormented and angsty to fade into the background. (Now I'm wondering if I ought to have remembered her. Anything I missed on my first trip through Little Dorrit I will blame on sharing my body with an enormous baby the whole time I was reading it. Joe was 9#12 when he was born, so I'm fairly sure every part of me, including my brain, had to squish into less space than it was accustomed to in order to make room for him.)

We also meet Pet Meagles in chapter 2; she is the anti-Miss Ware. Dickens says of her: "there was in Pet an air of timidity and dependence which was the best weakness in the world, and gave her the only crowning charm a girl so pretty and pleasant could have been without." I'm thinking Dickens would not have voted for Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary -- how about you?

#EAMDRAL, the PLAN

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!

May 16

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.

May 11

I did not remember the overtness of the anti-Semitism in Oliver Twist. Oliver has made his way to London and is living with Fagin and company, and Dickens is wielding the word "Jew" like a blunt instrument. I didn't remember it from reading Oliver Twist in the mid-90s, and I wasn't expecting it to be so blatant.

The last Jewish character who appeared in a May Dickens Read-Along was Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend. And Mr. Riah is so gentle that this treatment of Fagin's Jewishness is unexpected. I also didn't remember that his red hair was like a greasy pennant announcing his allegiance to Team Bad Guy. Off to Google I went.

Courtesy of Wikipedia I encountered a story I'd never read before. When Oliver Twist was being printed in a single volume, 15 years after it appeared in serial form, Dickens received a letter from a woman named Eliza Davis. Mrs. Davis was married to the man to whom Dickens had sold his house, a Jewish man. Mrs. Davis exhorted Dickens not to foment ugly prejudice, and he responded with conviction. He halted the printing and toned down the anti-Semitism in the chapters that hadn't yet been typeset. He changed his presentation of Fagin at public readings. And he created the character of Mr. Riah for Our Mutual Friend. How's that for "know better, do better" in action?

Dickens appears not to have had a redheaded correspondent to encourage him to lay down his unwarranted bias against that particular tribe. I also hit Google up for examples of redheaded Dickens characters. The three I found: Fagin, a sleazy lawyer in Old Curiosity Shop named Brass, and...Uriah Heep. 

This post was only 282 words long at the end of that last paragraph, but it has taken me a ridiculously long time to write. While I was drafting it our refrigerator door handle broke, prompting a lengthy and frustrating search for a replacement. The online parts people very helpfully turned up the right part in about 60 seconds, but then told me it would cost $114 shipped. "Is it gold-plated?" I asked in the chat window, but apparently $114 doesn't even get you any gold-plating these days. We are crossing our fingers and hoping that the $13 substitute does the job. It would be very first-world-problemated of me to tell you that my robot vacuum cleaner has also been giving me trouble, so I will say instead that the number of times I have hopped up from the couch to deal with a frustrating event is in the double digits. But for you, my friends, I have persevered. I declare victory over the first-world problems! (Or at least an end to the post.)

May 8

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?

#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.

It's #SAMDRAL time

Every year that I have been on the tenure track, I have celebrated the end of the spring semester with a deep dive into a fat Dickens novel. That means this is the Sixth Annual May Dickens Read-Along (#SAMDRAL for all you hashtaggers), and this year I am mixing it up a little. I am planning to reread two of the short novels instead of one of the fat novels: Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist.

Usually I start after final grades are submitted, but do you know, I am ready to leave the cruellest month behind and plunge right in. I plan to read ToTC across about ten days, posting intermittently about it as I go. Join me! 

Summer reading

I do not know why I am finding Pickwick Papers slow going this time around. Maybe I'm missing the May magic this year-- the June 1 deadline zoomed on by while I was still on about page 45. I've been stuck on page 284 for a week. But dernit, I am going to get into the Pickwick groove here. Really. 

I have another "ought-to" book in the swim bag: I'm halfway through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I am not sure how I got an English degree without ever reading Sir Gawain. Don't alert my alma mater, please. 

There's a library book on the coffee table that's been awaiting my attention for most of the summer. I pulled Code Girls from the shelf impulsively: it's about the American women who helped to break German codes during WW2. I thought it would be right up my alley but it has mostly been collecting dust. I either have to read it or return it in the next couple of weeks here, though, since I can't renew it again.

My Kindle right now looks like my good intentions and my mediocre time management skills got together one night and made an ugly baby. I'm a quarter of the way through NeuroTribes, which is fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. I'm not quite a quarter of the way through The Ambition Decisions, which is more annoying than anything else right now: privileged sorority women attempt to ease their first-world angst by classifying their friends while also observing that their classifications are fairly inconsistent. Let's hope it gets better.

I bought Laura Vanderkam's Off the Clock, because I always find her books thought-provoking even though she is another privileged woman talking to privileged women about their first-world angst. The writing in this one is strong and the ideas are worth thinking about.

Inspired might be the best Rachel Held Evans book I've read yet. It's about coming back to the Bible after an evangelical childhood and an uncertain young adulthood. Thumbs up so far, although Kindle tells me I'm basing that judgment on 18% of the book. I've also read 18% of The Shallows, about the cognitive costs of internet addiction. I probably stopped in the middle of reading it to tell Twitter what I thought about it, and never returned.

OH YOU GUYS, I kept swiping across the Kindle screen and I am feeling a moment of frugal-person guilt at the number of unfinished titles. This would be a long (and embarrassing) post if I kept telling you about them. I am going to do some catching up here, by gum, before I buy any more books. But hey, if enough of you click these affiliate links, Amazon will send me a gift card with which to buy more titles to recommend to you. We can have a perma-spiral of frugal-person guilt. How's that for a blog mission statement? 

FAMDRAL --> FAJDRAL

I sailed into Pickwick Papers right after the spring semester ended, but almost immediately I hit a long stretch of summer semester doldrums. I'm thinking about that pot of mental energy that equips me to do anything requiring perseverance and estimating that 80% of it was going toward my summer class. Then there was the 15% that has been in constant use since November 2016, attempting to cope with our new political reality, leaving only a dinky little sliver to get to grips with the meandering beginning of The Pickwick Papers.

But now! Sam Weller has arrived upon the scene, and Mr. Jingle is about to show his nature more plainly, and meanwhile Mr. Pickwick is in hot pursuit. Will the bamboozled spinster aunt escape unscathed?

When I first decided to reread Pickwick this year for the Fifth Annual May Dickens Read-Along, I thought I'd do a fun little series of posts about it. Instead I told you all to read it and then disappeared on you. If you started reading and bogged down, this is an invitation to get yourself unbogged. Hilarity awaits!

#FAMDRAL returns

TraLAAAAA, it's May. This means it's time for the Fifth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. This year's book is Pickwick Papers, which might be my favorite Dickens novel. (I know I keep telling you this. It's hard to pick my favorite-favorite, okay?) It is his most lighthearted, least sententious novel. Be advised, though: you have to give it a hundred pages' worth of benefit of the doubt, and thereafter it will richly reward the investment. I plan to start tomorrow. My goal is always to finish in about 3 weeks, which requires me to read 40-45 pages per day. No pressure to do it my way, of course. Join me -- I'd love some company!

A few more thoughts about this year's Dickens novel

I've mentioned before that one of the things I love about my long-haul read-the-complete-works projects is the way they acquaint me with an author's habits of thought. I still think about Shakespeare when I encounter snails easing their way through the world. One of the fun things about rereading Dickens is seeing the connections I couldn't have seen the first time through. For instance: I first read Martin Chuzzlewit before I read Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit. I didn't know, when I first read about spontaneous combustion as a possible fate for the Misses Pecksniff in 2001, that Dickens would revisit the idea nine years later to glorious effect. I hadn't met Sloppy back then, so I couldn't appreciate Mr. Nadgett's buttons, gleaming like eyes. I couldn't see the similarities between Mr. Bucket and Mr. Nadgett (ferreting out the truth is good work, says Dickens, but also lonely work), or between Mr. Montague/Tigg and Mr. Merdle (moving other people's money around is a parasitic way to make a living, says Dickens, and leads to (spoiler alert!) gory death).

For all my fan-girling, there are aspects of Dickens' writing that consistently annoy me. He seems, on the one hand, to say that we are who we are: we can smooth off some of our rough edges and get clearer on what matters, but we don't change in our essentials. But both this year and last year, I read books in which central characters spend big chunks of the plot engaged in an elaborate charade. Here I am, looking skeptically over the tops of my glasses at that idea. Which is it, Mr. Dickens? Are we destined to be the people we are, or can we pretend persuasively to be very different sorts of people? I am also permanently irked by his female characters, for whom timidity and meekness seem to be the cardinal virtues.

These are small annoyances, though, and they are more than offset by the pleasures of the big novels. There are the thematic delights-- he writes about a world in which justice prevails and capital-T Truth, too potent to be hidden, works through multiple characters to make itself known. There are the fingerprints of craftsmanship-- I'm thinking especially about the opening and closing family gatherings in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which we can see plainly the perils of pettiness.

My 14yo is reading Tale of Two Cities (a decision that made me say "My work here is done"), and I told him a couple of weeks ago that I'd read it along with him when I finished Martin Chuzzlewit. "I'm going to be sad when it ends," I said. A Dickens chapter a day might not keep the doctor away, but perhaps it keeps away tolerance of injustice and sub-par writing.

#FAMDRAL, completed

I just finished Martin Chuzzlewit. I have to re-evaluate my whole ranking scheme for Dickens novels, because Martin Chuzzlewit used to be tied with Dombey and Son for last place. I was so wrong, friends-- so wrong! It is hilarious and savage and skillfully written. Highly recommended.

#FAMDRAL, the midpoint

I crossed the halfway mark in Martin Chuzzlewit today, right on schedule. You guys, it's SO GOOD. I will have to go back and add asterisked updates to the posts in which I complained about it.

The particular reason I wanted to read it this year was its American chapters, which I found unexpectedly resonant in 2001. It had been less than a year since we returned to the US after two years in the UK, and I kept laughing at his impatient descriptions of American mores. I wondered if those chapters would still be as engaging this time around, almost 17 years after our return home, but I am finding them so relevant. I think in 2001 I underestimated the degree to which racism remained a problem in the US: I just did not have any idea how hard it is to be black in this country. Dickens is flat-out savage about American racism in Martin Chuzzlewit. He wouldn't be so angry if it were just that people kept inserting themselves boastfully into conversations on this side of the pond, or Yank-splaining England to Englishmen. It's the part where racists keep spouting off about freedom and equality for all that causes him to incandesce. And nobody incandesces about injustice quite like Dickens.

I think it was last year, when I was reflecting on Our Mutual Friend, that I mentioned how much clearer Dickens' mastery of the craft of novel-writing had become to me over time. I'm seeing it here too, with his interleaving stories. Skillful and fun and thought-provoking, all in one free package.

So. My initial recommendation to read this book was pretty tepid -- tepid enough that I think there were only two takers -- but I am surprised every day by how much I'm enjoying it. Join me!

#FAMDRAL day 7

You guys, I was so wrong about Martin Chuzzlewit. It's really good. Really good as in I am reluctant to put it down. Really good as in briskly paced* and bitingly funny.

*Just so we're all clear: "briskly paced" for a Dickens novel doesn't mean the same thing as "briskly paced" for, say, a Stieg Larsson novel. There's no escaping the lengthy and metaphorical landscape descriptions; you just have to roll with them.

It's possible that the wheels will fall off entirely as I enter the middle third of the novel, but so far it has been a delight. I am wondering if it seemed slow and draggy to me in 2001 because I'd only read one other fat Dickens novel at that point, or if there's some other reason I can't recall. At this point our guys are just about to set sail for the land of the forward and the home of the brash.

If you join me in the #FAMDRAL fun you'll be able to weigh in. You know you want to!