Skip to main content

A Dickens order

I'm in a Chinese poetry binge of Red Pine translations, and I'm reading a Star Trek novel, and a Joan Halifax book.

u/HutVader suggests this Order for Dickenson on r/charlesdickens

My recommended order (not entirely as I would rank his works, but this worked for me. More of ranked by order of essential reading). Oh and I recommend watching Dickensian the show as well, perhaps first.

Great Expectations

A Tale of Two Cities

Oliver Twist

David Copperfield

Bleak House

Hard Times

Little Dorrit

Nicholas Nickleby

The Christmas Stories

Edwin Drood

Our Mutual Friend

Old Curiosity Shop

Pickwick Papers

Dombey and Son

Martin Chuzzlewit

Barnaby Rudge

Sketches by Boz

[end]

I've read Barnaby Rudge and Pickwick Papers. I fell asleep listening to David Copperfield. Same with A Christmas Carol. I think I only listen to 40% at most, and sleep through most of it. I think I should stick to Moby Dick as my fall asleep book. One Hundred Years of Solitude was too exciting for me to fall asleep. Ditto for Sally Rooney.

Think I need to take the leap and really try working down this list. I was thinking about chronological order, but this makes sense. If you flounder, you've hit the important ones.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Manet and Degas

  Brilliant video explaining the exhibit. Go to the Met and see the exhibit! It's really quite special.  In the last gallery the painting this sketch is based off of, of the execution of a Mexican president. The painting has been cut into sections, and the surviving Degas has reassembled them. NY Times review
Post a Comment
Read more

movie versus book

I'm watching the movie a second time, and I'm halfway through the book. Among the movie's differences from the book. Sortilege starts off narrating. The movie doesn't have the school bell for the phone either, just a regular ring. It's really weird the way Doc shouts when he sees the photo of Amethyst as a baby. I guess it's to dramatize the negative impact of being pregnant and using, but the child we see looks pretty healthy. The child doesn't huff out because they're boring like she did in the book.  Superficially The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice are similar but it's a completely different style of narrative. The Coen brothers are amazing, they have a very witty movie that I have loved for a long time. Pynchon is a whole other realm of fiction, and this conversion is fairly faithful, taking out the best lines and making it more compact. The audio book is 15 hours, the movie is 2 hours. Anyway, I like the different movies for different reasons. T...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introduction

Robert B. Palmer's introduction to his translation of Walter F. Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult (p. ix-xi) Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas, Can ye listen in your silence? Can your mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands,  With a wind that evermore Keeps you out of sight of shore?                                     Pan, Pan is dead. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING The Dead Pan W H E N Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote these lines which sound so pessimistic and so limited to any lover of the beauty and truth of Greek mythology, she had in mind a famous passage out of Plutarch's De Oraculorum defectu {Mor. 419 A-E) in which it was reported on good authority that Pan had died. But let Plutarch tell the story (Philip is speaking):  As for death among such beings [i.e., deities], I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of...
Post a Comment
Read more