2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

This was a very difficult book to read, particularly in the beginning. It clocks in at 350,000 words and 770 pages, with 79! characters. The first 100 pages took me about a week. I do have to say, though, that it was very good. And the climax was a very fast read, say, pages 600-750 went by in a quick clip.

But what's it about, Redwing, you ask me. Well, it's Dickens, so it's about a bunch of stuff.

There are two main plots here, and a lot of smaller eddies.

First, we have the legal case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. This is a case between two friendly brothers who, in their best effort to be fair to each other, have asked the Court to determine a question about their father's Will. Countless years and 70,000 pounds later, the case is still undecided. The original brothers have died, and now their heirs are awaiting judgment, even though it hardly matters anymore.

Second we have the story of our...wait for it...orphaned narrator, Esther. I won't say much about her story because to say anything would be to spoil the many discoveries you know Dickens has laid before you. Of course, the two narratives are intertwined - Esther is the ward of John Jarndyce.

There is some really spectacular writing here; Dickens is a master craftsman.

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

And there are some really great characters. None as good as, say, The Artful Dodger, or Fagin. But some very close. I loved the policeman, "Bucket of the Detective," the character who does the most to weave together all of the loose strands of Dickens's narrative. Dickens has a way of putting character details just so, so you see the character as if he was walking across the room you're sitting in. He's a genius.

1. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

My second Dickens novel! I have read Tale of Two Cities a couple of times now, and have taught it once (you really get the feel of a book's structure after teaching it. I highly recommend it!). But while I had never read OT, I was kind of familiar with the story.

Here were my expectations: an orphan asks for more porridge, he gets kicked out of the orphanage, and he is impressed (in the Navy way) into a band of thieves.

What I got was much, much more.

Young Oliver is born in a work house, not an orphanage. And he does ask for more of the thin gruel the boys are barely fed in order to keep them barely alive. And he is kicked out and sent to work for a coffin maker. But even there he is met with more cruelty and abuse, and so he runs away to London. On the way to London he meets Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger himself, pickpocket extraordinaire, who takes him back to what I would call the Thieves Guild. And here is where the real narrative begins, with all its Dickensian twists and turns.

For the gamer, you have a great book for research on pickpockets and rogues of all kinds, especially Fagin, the evil, manipulative, and exploitive Guild Master. You get descriptions of the seedy side of the city: thieves hideouts, great pubs, and the back alleys of a grand urban area. And there are quite a few bad guys in here for any kind of campaign: Sikes, Fagin, Monks, and Noah Claypole.

For the English teacher you get essentially three kinds of narrative twisted into one challah of a story (and I am borrowing heavily from the essay by Janet Larson in my Norton anthology, because she puts it so succinctly): basically, OT is three parables. The first is the story of the triumph of good over evil, that Virtue will be rewarded and Vice will be punished. This is true of many of CD's novels. Second, we have a long-running parable of the Good Samaritan. Dickens uses this to demonstrate to his readers that there is a big gap between saying you're a Christian and acting like a Christian. And finally, the critique of social conditions. Dickens showing just how deplorable the conditions of the workhouses are and the absolute misery and hopelessness of 19th century poverty.

12. H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O'Brian

I stormed through this third book of the Aubrey series on my honeymoon, and I don't have it in me to write the review right now. But I'll get on it asap. And I'm into Book 4 already...

11. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

This Dickens guy is alright.

Backstory:
The Noble Evremonde brothers are bad. But Dr. Manette good, tries to help. But he feels bad. So he writes to the cops. The bad boy Evremondes block it and send him to jail. 18 long years go by.

Story:
His old assistant Defarge gets him released. Jarvis Lorry comes and gets him. Lucie, the Doctor's daughter, and Lorry bring him back to England. And they meet a young Charles Darnay on the ship. So helpful. So kind. So cute. It's LOVE! Darnay goes on trial. But is acquitted because this guy Carton looks JUST LIKE HIM!

The wine flows in the street like blood.

The end:
The strands of the web get tighter and tighter.

The Epilogue:
It IS a far, far better thing that he did.

10. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Another reading! And I'm'na have yet another in 2010 when I teach it (though I have not been counting books I have read, say, to teach year after year. Like, homw many times can I count To Kill a Mockinbird, or Macbeth, books I have taught every year for ten years. I practically have them memorized.).

But this time I read it for a grad class on HM. What a difference reading the book with a professor is. I see a lot more than I have ever seen, but there's still more to discover. Like seeing a whale, I guess, for just the fourth time.

9. Typee by Herman Melville

A travel narrative in the style of authors like Jonathan Swift and books like Utopia. Satirical. Critical of the Western worldview as saviors of the savage natives.

Tommo abandons his whaling ship when it lands at the remote Marquesa Islands. He lives among the natives, with the Typee tribe, for a few months and then escapes/leaves.

Recommended if you have someone else to talk to about the book, like me, say. But if you are going to read it in a vacuum of companionship, pick something else.

8. Peter Simple by Frederick Marryat

It's hard to believe I haven't finished a book in nearly four years. It's hard to believe because it's simply not true, no matter what you hear on FOX "news." I have been reading. I'm teaching: Tale of Two Cities, one of my favorite books; The Crucible, which I can't really express how bored I am of it; and Hamlet, which is so good, especially on this second reading. And I'm taking a course on Herman Melville, but until now, we have read all things that I've already read: Moby Dick, Pierre, and "Bartleby the Scrivener." For next week we are reading something new to me, Benito Cereno, one of the Piazza Tales, along with Bartleby and Billy Budd. SO far it has a very Joseph Conrad kind of feel to it. And I'm getting married in about three weeks, so there is that. I'm counting on the honeymoon's sitting around to end 2009 with a mass reading spree.

But, I've invited you here to talk about this book, Marryat's Peter Simple, published for the first time in 1834. The copy I have is from Dean King's excellent "Heart of Oak" series (Dr. Dogbody's Leg was another.). I can't recall where I heard it, but I understand that Marryat inspired Patrick O'Brian to write (and whose model for Jack Aubrey was Thomas Cohrane, an actual British Navy man).

Peter Simple is the son of a curate and is considered the fool of the family. His Uncle, Lord Privilege, is a rich baron nearby. Circumstances (that I can't recall, and really aren't that important) force Peter's father to send him to the Navy. Lord Privilege hooks him up with a position that allows him to follow the path of an officer, as opposed to serving before the mast, with the men. When he arrives at his first ship his country boy naivete is taken advantage of by his new shipmates. Quite badly. They trick him into insulting the captain, get him on the wrong side of the First Lieutenant, and all other smaller kinds of hazing that the good-natured, and rightly-named Peter Simple takes in stride. You'z guys are just funnin'!

Eventually, and ever so slowly, Peter gets the hang of the Navy. He finds his Garth/Ted/Han Solo/Louise/Stephen Maturin sidekick character in Terence O'Brien and they team up for pretty much the rest of the book: they have a good and kind captain, they fight some sea battles, they are taken prisoner, have to escape, fall in love, and then O'Brien gets his own ship. After that they fight some sea battles, remmet their loves, are caught in a hurricane, and get taken prisoner, are released, and then, sadly they are separated. O'Brien is sent to the East Indies and Peter is made First Mate on the Rattlesnake with the ineffective weasel Captain Hawkins.

And so here we must pause for a bit of a breather to explain the subplot.

Lord Privilege is Peter's grandfather. He's old and grey and full of sleep and nods by the fire. Peter also has an uncle. The uncle is a regular old Worm Tongue and has ingratiated himself into the grandfather's trust. And so he, the uncle, does a little tinkering of the grandfather's will, leaving Peter's father nothing, and himself everything. This destroys Peter's father. And puts Peter at risk in the service, especially once he is assigned to the Rattlesnake, where the uncle's friend Captain Hawkins is the commander. But before that there is much letter writing back and forth to England, and even Ireland (O'Brien tries to help, too) and many setbacks and dark days. Peter goes through many, many troubles - he even has to sit through a Court Martial! But, as Hamlet says, "Foul deeds will rise,though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes."

I'll leave the ending to you to figure out, of course, but if you have read much 19th C. Lit, you know there are a lot of happy coincidences and just-in-the-nick-of-timeses, and lots of karmic judgments to go around.

I definitely recommend you read it, especially if you're a Friend of Patrick O'Brian.

7. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

A damning indictment of American conformity.

This was one of the best books I have ever read. The writing was sharp, fresh and interesting. Even though it was written in 1920, the problems facing George Babbitt are surprisingly modern.

Babbitt is a real-estate salesman and member of all the booster clubs and business associations in his town - think Elks and Rotary club and all that. But something is nagging his conscience. Facing the beginning of his middle age, his regrets begin to pile up. He yearns for a break out. But as his restlessness grows, so does the resistance from his community, putting a friction on his revolution.

I very strongly recommend this book. Lewis is a master as diagnosing the problems with too much commercialism. Unfortunately, he doesn't offer any solution, but maybe he thought that simply showing us the mess we're in would be enough for us to reform our ways. Obviously things have only gotten worse in the last 90 years, but that only makes the book more important now. Read it!

6. Post-Captain by Patrick O'Brian

Book #2 in the Aubrey-Maturin saga.

This was a good book, despite the fact that there were fewer sea battles: this was more a good look at Aubrey and Maturin dealing with the politics of the Navy, falling in love, and riding the shifting sentiment of Society.

5. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

My 3rd time through.

I got to teach it to my 12th graders, this time. Only one of them read the whole thing (out of 19).

And I'll be reading it again in the Autumn for a class on Melville.

If you haven't read it, you should.

4. Dr Dogbody's Leg by James Norman Hall

You may recognize Hall from his more popular book Mutiny on the Bounty.

This was a pretty good book. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the ten chapters each explain how Dr Dogbody lost his leg. Some were better than others, but all were very entertaining. Dr Dogbody would make a great NPC! And I really want to go to a place like the Cheerful Tortoise, where Dogbody tells his tales. The stories are distinct, yet, the narrative is continuous: each night Dogbody's friends implore him to tell his story, and he pretends he won't. But eventually he yields.

Recommended if you like sea stories.