David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

About an hour ago I finished this classic Dickens novel. I have now worked my way through three of the Dickens classics and I can honestly say that these books are timeless.

There is a reason that outside of Shakespeare the works of Charles Dickens are redone, reinvented, and reinterpreted, more than any other author. They hold up.

This book was just a side read for me over the last couple of months so I took the opportunity to savor it, sips at a time as it were.

Just this morning when the narrator Copperfield talks about what a fine jail has been built in London in his absence and comments of the protests that would come about had the money for that fortification been diverted for a fine school and you can see that, sadly, the more things change the more they stay the same.

The characters in this book, from Mr. Micawber, Agnes, Peggotty, Ham, Traddles to the wicked Uriah Heep make this book soar. Some say this is Dicken's most autobiographical novel, if so he certainly new some interesting and unique people.

Being provincial Americans we often point to Mark Twain as the great writer of the nineteenth century. Twain was talented, but for me though it is no contest. Dickens was and remains the true giant.

I must say I am sorry to Mrs. Bagley. My Junior High English teacher exhorted us to read these books, and in high school Mr. Peaco said the same. I,like many of you with your teachers, ignored their directives. They now rest in peace but I hope they hear me tell them they were correct, we all should read these books.

Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and now David Copperfield. Dickens was a genius.

Huck Finn by Mark Twain

This book is called The Great American Novel by many literary critics. It is a very good book. Still in reading this book, as good as it was, there is no way it can be called a great novel. Twain to me was as much as a satirist as a literary writer.

Huck Finn is often at the top of the list of books banned by libraries and schools across the country. Why? Well like Faulkner in the early twentieth century Twain in the nineteenth used some very racially colorful language. Other concerns were about references to Huck and the Slave Jim going naked on the raft.

These complaints are silly to us in the modern world. The story of Huck Finn is very strong. Still this material is dated. Dated in a way that does not mean it should be controversial but that simply the story is a bit contrived. To me, when Tom appears and he and Huck are making efforts to free Jim the repeated efforts to make the plot more complicated and dangerous do not age well. It is understood that Tom was raised on adventure stories and wants to live out his imagination but the plot and things they have Jim do seem a bit silly and unrealistic.

Of course Twain was writing about a time when Black people were kept in bondage and slavery so perhaps this was just one more layer of ridiculousness he was trying to exhibit to prove the point of how a society could claim to be all beneovelent and gracious as the Southern culture claimed and yet keep slaves. Huck struggles with this too. When he comments on how he thinks less of Tom for Tom saying he would help him free a slave and when he admits he will be going straight to Hell if helps Jim escapes he shows the conflict of the South.

This is a good book. I am glad I read it. Perhaps like much literature it is a matter of style, taste, and personal preference but to me putting Twain in the echelon of writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck is something that requires a stretch of the nature of the whoppers told by Tom Sawyer.

Read it. Enjoy it. It is, however, overrated.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

William Faulkner is not one of our easiest writers to appreciate. I was given a Faulkner book, Light in August I believe it was, to read in college as an assignment. I am sure I did not read it. I think Cliff helped me on that one. I think today kids use some free resource called perhaps " Sparknotes" to help them in similar situations.

However, my reading list shows I am going back and reading them all. I hope that Ms. Bruer appreciates it.

Faulkner is dense. Whereas Hemingway declares and makes clear Faulkner is shady and ambiguous. Many times in these collections of stories of Faulkner's you will read well into a story assuming an assumed fact from the narrator and then find your assumption was wrong and you will have to reinterpret the whole story based off this new information.

I will confess that some of these stories found me going back and rereading after this new information came to light. Faulkner is not easy.

Faulkner is however worthwhile. Some of the stories are so dense in dialect and fuzziness and first person versus second and third that they do not stand out for me. Perhaps the fact that much of my reading is done last at night is not the best time for them. Some of the stories however are to be treasured.

For me the stories The Tall Men, Two Soldiers and it's conclusion Shall Not Perish are three standouts which measure against anything I have read. Hair, Uncle Willy, The Brooch, Beyond, and There Was a Queen stand out.

I must confess the section of the stories called The Wilderness was told in such a dialect and improbable way that I still struggle to gain any pleasure from it.

Faulkner was not easy. He was however masterful in what he did. His work I assume because of it's depiction of the South in the times he wrote is not in anyway shape or from politically correct today. It does not have merit because of some of the implied racism of the speech and culture presented but it also does not not have merit because of these issues either. If that makes sense.

The recent censoring of Twain made sense in that some said that without he would not be taught at all. If that is the case so be it. Are we really so sensitive however that we cannot read history and fiction from a historical time period and appreciate it's merits without endorsing all of its views.

It is a subject that rankles. If you find Faulkner dense, written in a way you do not like and do not wish to wade in that is a legitimate thought and decision. Some of the easy criticism that is lodged his way due to how and what he wrote would make almost any authentic writing of a time period unable to be appreciated a century later were it to be the rule.


These stories are classics.