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).

Harry Potter fans, stay away from Yahoo! I hear there's a big spoiler for the last book just splashed on the front page in a headline.

Not having seen it (thanks for the warning!) I still doubt very much it's a legit spoiler--JKR has done a remarkable job on keeping the lid on plot points quiet, especially this far before a book is published. Now, if that spoiler is more speculation, like the ones flying around the internet about Dumbledore dying before HBP was published, that's something else entirely.

It's not much of a spoiler, I think, and it's out of the mouth of JKRowling. Here's what it is: JKR said at least two characters will die in the last book, but she's not saying who.

JKR has done a remarkable job on keeping the lid on plot points quiet

My intel says that the headline is actually "Rowling: [spoiler] in last HP book," which sounds like she's specifically letting it out for some godforsaken reason.

It's from an interview with JKR, so I'd guess legit. That said, it's quite non-specific - very general plot rather than anything character specific. What's our whitefont rule around here?

That's an old spoiler, if you can even call it that.

I read Jesse's whitefont, and that's not much of a spoiler, just enough to tease the reader. Actually, it's pretty much on par with what I imagined would be happening (she doesn't avoid darker territory, especially in the later books). I do like the way that she writes the books to be progressively more dense, plotwise, as well as taking the characters into the greyer life of adulthood.

Reminds me of what Laura Ingalls Wilder (and her daughter, Rose, if you believe the ghostwriter allegations about her) did in the Little House books--from On the Shores of Silver Lake on, those books really delve into adult life as seen from an adolescent's eyes, albeit an adolescent who is forced to shoulder adult responsibilities (taking care of her blind sister, worrying with Ma over the dangerous mob of railroad workers, then helping to run an impromptu boarding house to make money for Mary's school fund).