I like the fact that Bourdain's show on Travel Channel comes with a parental warning. Must be all the drinking and smoking and snarking at Rachael Ray.

Must be all the drinking and smoking and snarking at Rachael Ray.

Well, he's got to have someone to whale on now that he's gone all mea culpa about Emeril.

Has anyone read Bleak House ?

How does it end? I just finished the BBC adaptation with Gillian Anderson and it was great--twisty plots and a million colorful characters--but it really sort of fell apart in the last episode. I feel like it was missing some crucial piece of plot. Lady Dedlock dies and I'm expecting Esther is going to get something out of that but nothing happens. Lady Dedlock's husband recovers from his stroke and is sad and wishes she had known it wouldn't have mattered to him but that's it. Is it supposed to echo the whole Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case? So much energy and time and lives went into the case and when it was settled any money from it was eaten up in court costs? Did I just miss the point?

I'm reading Bleak House right now!

Of course, I'm about 50 pages in, so it'll probably take a while for me to finish it.

I'm reading Bleak House right now!

AIFG?

I only got about halfway through Bleak House when I was supposed to read it for class years ago, so I can't help you with the end.

It's less "FG" than "FDickensian", but I expected that going in, and I rather like Dickens.

Now I'm wondering if I should try to get the miniseries from Netflix first, though.

Now I'm wondering if I should try to get the miniseries from Netflix first, though.

I really did find it highly entertaining and satisfying until the very last 1/2 hour episode.

Lisah, yeah, Esther getting anything is not the point, and it's very like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. All that foment and heartbreak, when a bit of eye-to-eye and honesty would have cleared up so much. Having a relationship with her mother mattered much more than anything financial, and I always thought that sequence, the chase across the city in search of "the mother of the dead child" was such a modern bit of writing. So much of Dickens isn't, is so glaringly 19th C., but that bit is. As long as Esther has a nice doctor to marry, and good friends, and a virtue to uphold, getting the money isn't what matters. Richard is the counterexample, of going so hard after the money that everything else falls away. So many of Dickens's protagonists end up the same way: safely middle-class, or rich but with middle-class values.

In Nicholas Nickleby, Nicholas's benefactors, the brothers Cheeryble, are industrialists from the lower class, and there is constant astonishment by both characters and authors that they should be so delicate of feeling and refined. They were fated to become rich, and to marry their nephew to Kate, because they already acted like they were middle-class without being born to it! OMG!!

There's a certain amount of irritating self-satisfaction in Dickens that way, even as he skewers various aspects of the middle-class social bubble of his time.

Thanks, Nutty. I guessed that might be the case and I guess should be satisfied with it (at least I am happy that Esther ends up happy and loved).