So the question is, why do all the schools make us read it??

Misery loves company?

Also, I want to have a talk with the first person who put Bartleby the Scrivener into the curriculum.

Hm, I rather like old Bartleby, but I always read and enjoyed that as a precursor to Camus and the like.

Bartleby makes me laugh out of sheer frustration, in that What About Bob? kind of way.

I remember reading Hard Times in high school, and I might even still have it on my shelves, but Dickens is such hard slogging for me.

Is Hard Times the one where one of the character's father is The Aged P? And he (Aged P) is hard of hearing, so the son rigged up a system of little signs that would pop out of the stonework around the fireplace? Or is that another Dickens?

That's Great Expectations, Steph.

I haven't read any Dickens in over 15 years, so I'm not surprised I've conflated them.

I loved the Aged P! He's such a minor character, but it's a nice detail. And is yet another example of Dickens and his fetish for cold bosses with wonderfully nice clerks. (Dickens was a clerk, in his youth.)

I saw a miniseries version of Great Expectations when I was about 12 with Anthony Hopkins as Abel Magwitch and John Rhys-Davies as Joe Gargery. (I didn't know really who these people were at the time, but in the years since JRD has always been Joe Gargery in my head.) In that version, the Aged P. lived in a colorful garden full of pinwheels. I haven't seen that version in 16 years, but it's still vivid in my mind.

And I'm thinking maybe that was the point.

I think you're right there Hil. Sometimes the fantastical is much better than fact.

Another Dickens fan here. He was brilliant at creating memorable minor characters.

The Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend....

You are so insane. Best. Book. Ever.

I wear it with pride, Plei. Bored me to tears. I gave up 100 pages in, making it one of the very few books I hated enough to not finish reading (the only other one, in fact, that I can think of offhand was Where The Heart Is, which my mother-in-law insisted I read -- I'm not sure how far I got into that one before my brain threatened to turn off my pleasure center forever if I didn't just stop).

So, I've almost finished a re-read of Pynchon's Vineland, which, while not his best book, is criminally underrated. Although it's his most linear book (despite the fact that it switches back-and-forth through time and across perspectives with slippery ease), it's a dead-on prescient parody of Ashcroft's concepts of justice and a sharp look at the fascism of desire and the legacy of the 1960s.

I should re-read Vineland too--the only thing I remember about it is "The Italian Wedding Fake Book by Deleuze and Guattari".

That cracked me up. Actually, I'd forgotten how generally funny Vineland is. I've yet to read a long stretch without finding a hilarious little gem.