Back to Book Club

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.