The Enid Blyton Society

Any Dickens fans here? I am on a Dickens readathon at the moment. It's kind of strange to flit between Little Dorrit and Last Term at Malory Towers, which i am also reading . My favourite Dickens so far is probably Nicholas Nickleby. I'd like to talk with anyone else who is a fan (or even a critic!).

Hi Moose,

I'm an admirer of Charles Dickens, especially Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol. They're the only two titles I've re-read in recent years, though I have read a lot more in the past. I love the way Dickens enjoys language and constantly plays around with it. His writing is gloriously rich and I find that his books need to be read slowly and savoured.

Anita

OT. Darling Anita, I've just noticed your birthday is but one year and one day before mine!

Thanks for pointing out that I'm older!

Did you know that Fatty's birthday is either at the very end of December or the beginning of January, according to one of the books? That makes him a fellow Capricorn!

Anita

Darling I'm sure you look much younger!
No, I didn't know Fatty was a Capricorn, in that case, he, like me, is far from being the conservative, reserved personality, so typical of the star sign!

I like Dickens too, as well as various other Victorian authors, including Wilkie Collins.
David Copperfield is one of my favourite Dickens books. I've just picked up a nice old copy of the Pickwick Papers, so will probably be reading that one soon. I haven't read it before so am quite looking forward to it.

I tried Pickwick when I was a teenager and couldn't get into it. That said, as a teenager I hated all of Dickens's books .. that held true for well into my twenties too. For some reason I decided that I was going to read all his books earlier this year and started working my way through them and to my surprise I really enjoyed them. Am not sure why and what has changed.

[Mollybob:] "I like Dickens too, as well as various other Victorian authors, including Wilkie Collins."

The only Wilkie Collins I've ever read is The Moonstone and, while I loved the atmosphere of the novel, I found it hard to follow the plot because of the changing narrators.

A few weeks ago I read Charlotte Bronte's Villette and enjoyed all the little subtleties and the incredible coincidences that are to be found in so many novels of that era. I like the way characters meet up after years apart and fail to recognise one another (or purposely choose not to disclose their identity); the gradual discovery that the lives of seemingly disparate characters are significantly interwoven. This is a common theme in Dickens too.

[Moose:] "I tried Pickwick when I was a teenager and couldn't get into it. That said, as a teenager I hated all of Dickens's books .. that held true for well into my twenties too."

I first tried reading Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist when I was eleven, and didn't manage to finish it. The language was too complicated and I found it dull. However, when I was about seventeen I read A Tale of Two Cities and was hooked from beginning to end.

My daughter, aged eleven, read A Christmas Carol a few months ago and enjoyed it. It's a lot shorter than the other novels of course, and perhaps the most accessible for younger readers, but she struggled with the vocabulary and kept stopping to ask me the meanings of words. Recently she had to write a poem for school about a fictional character and she chose Scrooge, so the book must have made an impression on her.

Anita

I read TOTC at 17 too. I enjoyed it more than I had the very limited number of Dickens I had read previously, but still found it quite a chore. I was quite a lot older when I started to like Victorian Lit in general and older even than that when I started to like DIckens (which was actually very recent..).

Droitwich Lloyd wrote:OT. Darling Anita,......

Droitwich Lloyd wrote: Darling I'm sure you look much younger!

Hey, what's going on here; if you are trying it on with our Anita, I am ahead of you in the queue.

Darling, indeed.

What the Dickens...?!

I've already had my husband peering over my shoulder in horror at the sight of the thread called "Anyone for Sex?" !

Anita

*primly steers topic back to Dickens *

I have read and loved Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby. Also Great Expecatations. Though I now remember the film better. It was a great film (black/white)!

In fact the Victorian authors made me an anglophile. I'm not so sure I would appreciate the modern England as much though.

I love Jane Austen (well, she is perhaps pre-Victorian), the Brontë sisters (all three of them) and many more. A project of mine is to read them all, even the less famous ones.

Moose wrote:Any Dickens fans here? I am on a Dickens readathon at the moment. It's kind of strange to flit between Little Dorrit and Last Term at Malory Towers, which i am also reading . My favourite Dickens so far is probably Nicholas Nickleby. I'd like to talk with anyone else who is a fan (or even a critic!).

I've read all the Brontes and Austens novels - I love them. I think that Anne Bronte is much underrated, though Wuthering Heights is my favourite novel that any of them produced (with Jane Eyre a close second). Some of Charlotte's stuff wasn't great though.

I really like Jane Austen. Her books are so cleverly written and very funny. I like Jane Eyre more than any of the other Bronte books I've read.

Has anyone read Nancy Mitford's books (1930s)? I discovered them a couple of years ago. They're very entertaining.