Longtime Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu will be aware that Bleak House is one of my favorite books. Well, and my Best Reader finally acceded to its choice as a bedtime book. This is, over the last ten or eleven years, the third Dickens so selected, but that’s counting A Tale of Two Cities, which scarcely seems right. For reasons good and bad, I take on all the reading myself, when it comes to Dickens, rather than our usual practice of alternating. This, of course, means I hog the reading for months at a time; it’s lovely that my Best Reader humors me so well. Of course, knowing the books as well as I do, it’s easier for me to, say, imitate a character’s manner of speech, if I know how that character turns out, and more important, how long that character will be speaking. I quite like my Krook, but I’d hate to have to do any extended bit in his voice.
This was, by the way, why it was a bit of a relief when Sirius Black was killed; the voice I’d chosen for him when he was a crazy and doomed killer was tearing hell out of my throat. Plus, as it turned out, Mr. Black and Mr. Lupin had (in my reading) similar enough voices that conversations between them were an unforeseen problem. Well, there it is.
Anyway, I doubt we’ll do another Dickens for some years. We’ve started Kavalier and Clay, which will likely take us through the rest of the summer. The last book before Bleak House was The Tipping Point; no that’s not right. Tipping Point came before Moo, and then we read Inkheart, and then Bleak House. Hm. Am I missing something? I remember all of those, but I don’t remotely remember the order of them. Other books in the more distant past include Nicholas Nickleby, Madame Bovary, Holes, The Finn Family Moomintroll, The Twenty-One Balloons, the Elmer and the Dragon books, Peter Pan, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and some of the Diana Wynne Jones Dalemark books. Oh, and the His Dark Materials trilogy. On the whole, yes, we find that children’s books and YA books work well, although there is also something lovely about spending four months going through a big book. You become familiar with the characters in a way that is different from a read over a week or two, and of course, reading Dickens aloud is a pleasure in itself.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.