Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Bleak House.




I couldn't decide which cover I wanted to use, so I put both of them up there. The actual copy I'm using for class right now looks much more modern and photoshopped... and boring, because that's what a lot of modern art has become. Artistic, simplistic... give me a break. It's boring.

Just like any Dickens novel! Blogging from within an old classroom in the Chemistry building, with molecular theories scribbled on the blackboard and students sitting separately in old school, wooden desks, I'm currently in the middle of an English class on medicine and mystery in Victorian literature. Having read Shelley's Frankenstein, Collins' The Moonstone and Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, we began to study Dickens' Bleak House (which I always seem to mistype as "Bleach House") about two weeks ago.

I have to say, I was not looking forward to this book from the moment I picked it up at the bookstore. The story is 914 pages long and the book is thick, plus I've had bad experiences from reading another one of Dickens' novels for another class, Hard Times, which I must say is perfectly capable of boring someone to death.

But I was surprised- it's not as bad as I thought it would be. As expected, the writing style is quite dull (I've never been a Dickens fan), it's slow, and just like any Victorian novel, character descriptions are much too exaggerated. But I found that I quite like some of the characters in the book, especially a very, very minor character named Prince Turveydrop- and yes, you guessed it- simply because of his name. At least the story doesn't center around the Industrial Revolution again, and I much prefer the overly angelic and delicate protagonist in Bleak House than psycho ones pretending to be tragic heroes.

I suppose I should go back to taking notes. I still am no Charles Dickens fan, but Bleak House has definitely convinced me that Hard Times must then be one of the worst ones.

2 comments:

  1. you know what?

    FUCK Lucy Mannette

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hahaha yes Monica, I know very well that A Tale of Two Cities is your absolute favourite book :D

    ReplyDelete