What the Dickens!
30/11/09 18:30 Filed in: Reading
Last week, I turned on the TV to find nothing of note
on but a PBS presentation of what I thought to be a
fairly bizarre musical version of Charles Dickens'
A Tale of Two Cities. It wasn't a musical
like Oliver! but more a filming of a staged
version of an English-language opera. I found it
awful yet strangely compelling.
It also convinced me that I should go back and read the original novel, which I had not read since my undergraduate days in Hamilton. Figuring that Patti and I own about five million books (the residue of five university degrees in English literature and one in law), I was pretty confident we'd have a copy of A Tale of Two Cities somewhere in the house.
Sure enough, with a little bit of looking, I located one. A very small one. Our Macmillan's Pocket Classics edition of Dickens' classic (published in 1921) measures four and a half inches wide by five and three quarters inches high. In modern terms, it's about the size of an iPhone.
And the printing? Well, let me see. It's this big! For 402 tiny pages!
A challenge to read, if I do say so myself. I can't say I'm gobbling it up the way I do a Harry Potter book or a Dick Francis mystery but I'm really enjoying it. Dickens wrote in an era where time was taken to describe the scene and the people in it fully, to make broad philosophical points and to ponder the great mysteries of life. Dickens, in other words, got paid by the word.
So that's where I am right now. Reading Dickens and enjoying the rambling prose. And not doing any writing of my own.
It also convinced me that I should go back and read the original novel, which I had not read since my undergraduate days in Hamilton. Figuring that Patti and I own about five million books (the residue of five university degrees in English literature and one in law), I was pretty confident we'd have a copy of A Tale of Two Cities somewhere in the house.
Sure enough, with a little bit of looking, I located one. A very small one. Our Macmillan's Pocket Classics edition of Dickens' classic (published in 1921) measures four and a half inches wide by five and three quarters inches high. In modern terms, it's about the size of an iPhone.
And the printing? Well, let me see. It's this big! For 402 tiny pages!
A challenge to read, if I do say so myself. I can't say I'm gobbling it up the way I do a Harry Potter book or a Dick Francis mystery but I'm really enjoying it. Dickens wrote in an era where time was taken to describe the scene and the people in it fully, to make broad philosophical points and to ponder the great mysteries of life. Dickens, in other words, got paid by the word.
So that's where I am right now. Reading Dickens and enjoying the rambling prose. And not doing any writing of my own.