Ah, January. That industrious month of maintaining resolutions and
going back to a normal daily life after the parties and feasts of the
holiday season.
Today Mom, Elizabeth, and I resumed our
weekly visits to the local Starbucks for our literary class/reading and
writing club. Over coffee, tea, and warm sandwiches, we discussed
Dickens, George Eliot, "Downton Abbey," that British drama we've heard
so much about and have finally dived into (and are loving), as well as
branching off onto other topics that have very little to do with our
initial subject at all. (Often followed by, "How did we get on this
topic anyway?" Life is so canonical!)
In today's
chapter of "Harold Bloom's Western Canon," Bloom chose to focus on only
one of Charles Dickens novels, "Bleak House." (Thank goodness we only
went over one or we may have been reading that chapter for weeks!) I
have never read "Bleak House" but have read other novels by Dickens and
seen a very good BBC adaptation. It is much easier to watch a television
production of Dickens than to read one of his novels because the man
does tend to ramble. I remember one case in "David Copperfield" where he
spent two very long paragraphs talking about something that had
literally nothing to do with the story! And Dickens has so many
characters to keep track of. As Elizabeth accurately stated, "If Dickens
spends two lines describing someone, that person will change your
life!" 'Tis true.
Well Charles Dickens is not one of my
favorite authors, I would much rather read Jane Austen or Norah Lofts,
but he does belong in the canon of Western literature. He did after all
give us "The Christmas Carol," and "A Tale of Two Cities" is on my list
of books to re-read in the near future.
Of George
Eliot I know almost nothing and have never really read any of her works.
I did learn some interesting things about her from today's chapter and
our discussion, but I prefer chapters where I at least know something
about the writer we're discussing and/or have read their work. It makes
it easier to pick out why they belong in the Canon, and then I don't
have to go completely off of Bloom's opinions which, I confess, I tend
not to trust. (We don't see eye to eye on everything.) I'm always
grateful that my Mom is so well educated and understands just about
everything Bloom is talking about, because I sure don't!
Next
week we read about and discuss Tolstoy, who I know nothing about except
that I believe he is Russian (Russian literature=depressing) and he's
one of the authors Quorra has read in "Tron: Legacy."
