Here's the summation of last week's Classics Reading Group by our very own Laura Gillenwater (who is now named in full because she wants to be able to find this by googling on herself):

Wow - despite several of our regular members being unable to attend this

month due to conflicting priorities, illness, or injury (nothing

serious, thankfully), leaving us with a group of seven people this

month, I had a hard time reigning in the discussion at quarter to nine

so we could get to the voting! Of course there's a lot to discuss in

900+ page book with a gazillion distinct characters - which is what we

had to deal with in tonight's book, "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens. I

hardly know where to begin in terms of synopsizing (is that a word?) our

discussion! To be honest, I'd rather not even try this month (if you'll

forgive me), since it's kind of late and I want to get out the voting

results before I have go to sleep. I will say that six out of the seven

people did finish the entire book before the meeting (a better

percentage than one might expect, given the length of the book) and

everyone liked it, although at least one person felt that it didn't

really get going for him until well into the book. Everyone (or almost

everyone?) agreed that the non-Esther-narrative parts of the book were a

bit slower to read than typical Dickens, partly because there were a lot

of characters to try to keep track of (one member suggested that it

would have been helpful to have a Dramatis Personae list, like they have

for lots of Russian novels) and, possibly, as suggested by another

member, because Dickens was intentionally trying to make the progress

slower to mimic the Chancery process (an interesting theory!).

Okay, not really a summation this time, but she would have been up all night trying to summarize the conversation, which had a lot of ground to cover what with 50+ characters all interweaving in and out of various plots and subplots. This is supposed to be Dickens best book, not his most famous or his most memorable, but most well-written. The alternating narrative styles between the journal-type entries of the goody-twoshoes heroine, Esther (whom some members of the group thought was a stronger character than others did) and the present-tense, sometimes downright poetic filling in between of all the bits that Esther wouldn't know about first hand give you as a reader enough variety that there's something for everybody. The bad guys aren't completely bad, the women aren't completely non-descript, there are few standout oddball characters, but on the whole this gives people who tend to find Dickens overwrought a little more to latch onto.



The backdrop of the chancery court case that has been dragging on for generations is easily paralleled in the present day (think Anna Nicole Smith, for a start). Richard, the young cousin who decides to devote his life to seeing the case through to completion is just sympathetic enough to be tragic, and like any great tragic figure doesn't live long enough to see his dream come to naught. Dickens gets in plenty of digs about the bureaucracy and corruption of the courts, and about the plight of those with the misfortune to be poor and uneducated. There's so much going on in this book, it benefited from a reading group discussion just so we could fill in the forgotten or unnoticed pieces in each other's reading experiences to expand our appreciation that much more.



I read this book 15 years ago and all I remembered was there was a court case and it ultimately came to nothing. I never saw the Masterpiece Theatre version, but the imagery, particularly when the case is dismissed and everyone exits the chancery building laughing, the clerk is bringing out papers and dumping them on the sidewalk, and the court-groupie Miss Flite sets her birds free, all in rapid succession, is just one of many brilliantly evocative sequences in the book. There's no Fagin, no Quilp, no Miss Haversham, so I think the specifics of the plot don't stick with you as easily, but there's also so much going on you don't get the feeling of padding like you do with some of the other books. You do get the sense that he knew where he was going from the start, though, again unlike some of the others, so there are far fewer jarring coincidences. I could keep going and going, this was a great book and a great discussion book, even for those who don't ordinarily like Dickens (although Evan wasn't there to really put that theory to the test).