In the Margin
November 25, 2009

As Opposed to the Mall

One of the pleasures of a four-day weekend is the prospect of digging into the sort of reading that can't be sandwiched into the end of a working day.  Thanksgiving itself, for many people, is given over to the communal pleasures of cooking and eating a monumental meal, but there's Friday and Saturday, and not everyone is going shopping.  Somewhere in there, some of us are thinking about settling down with those long books one wants to just sink into.

 

Personally, I'm on a bit of a Dickens kick right now, having immersed myself for some time in Michael Slater's new biography of the writer (see the image to the right).  So I'm looking forward to a bit of space over the weekend to re-read one of his novels -- the question is, which one?  The well-worn but beloved pages of David Copperfield always beckon, and although Great Expectations is over-familiar from mulitple encounters during school, one can always encounter something new.  There is the dark grandeur in Our Mutual Friend, which more than deserves another reading -- or, on the opposite end of things, I'm always rewarded when I pick up The Pickwick Papers for a burst of Dickens at his most playful (though I have rarely felt compelled to follow Mr. Pickwick's adventures all the way through).

 

But I think I'm most likely to return to  Bleak House, which I haven't looked at again since seeing the effectively serialized BBC adaptation back in 2006.    Its combination of mystery, melodrama, social critique and romance is invariably addictive.   Not sure I'll get it all in -- but then I'll have something to look forward to finishing on the subway when the work week starts again.

 

What will you be reading over this weekend?

 

-BILL TIPPER

 

 

Daybook

May 23: Girolamo Savonarola was hanged on this day in 1498 and then incinerated in the same piazza in which the citizens of Florence had earlier attended more than one "bonfire of the vanities." George Eliot's 1863 novel Romola,…

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