Occam and Soul Coughing suggest that Correlation is not Causation in this case.

t Hearting Plei right now.

I go to sleep now, and await the massive flaming I will receive whilst I'm gone.

Sean, my only "flame" is that your comment belongs in the Music thread, where the people who hang out there can respond to your accusation of elitism there.

Nothing for "Dead! Dead, my lords and gentlewomen. Dead, you Right Reverends and wrong reverends of every order, Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in you hearts. And dying thus around us, every day."

What's that from! Amazing how a good quote will suck me in.

And Gwendolen's painful growing up. Her sections were a bit dull at the beginning, but by the end, I wept for her.

Gwendolen is the part of that book that works for me. I liked her from the beginning.

Esther Summerson, now -- there I had a similar trajectory to the one you described. At the beginning I wanted to strangle her for her continual hesitation and self-deprecation and overweening humility (one of my professors made a good case for this as one a realistic portrait of psychological damage -- quite different from the effect Dickens was going for in the rest of the book -- but it still grated terribly), and then by the end I felt deeply and terribly for her.

What's that from! Amazing how a good quote will suck me in.

Bleak House, IIRC.

While I am sad to be shunned by Nutty, I must admit to a lack of tears. And yet I still have big love for Bleak House. Just not the cryin' kind of love.

I first read "Count of Monte Cristo" because it was the thickest book in the library. "Bleak House" is big, you say?

Oh! It's the climax of the first "character flees from awfulness" segment of the story, where Jo is finally found by all those trying to rescue him. Note how I can quote it extemporaneously, because it made such an impression on me.

Esther is an odd bird. I don't always like her when we're reading her narratives; but I like her very much when all the other characters look at her. It's very rare that I can read a first-person narrative and really believe that the narrator knows herself so poorly.

The reason I came back to Bleak House -- I "read" it in college, and realized later I had zero comprehension of it -- was that scene where they are chasing the mother of the dead child. My teacher read it out loud, and I never got over the coolness of the narration: "the mother of the dead child", and no histrionics. That was what made me have to go back 5 years later and read it properly, myself, and boy was I glad I had.

And last night I finished House of the Scorpion, which Nutty had generously left with me. Excellent YA novel, full of thoughtful policial, social, and scientific speculation about the drug wars, and the implications of cloning and genetic manipulation. Good stuff.

Is that by Nancy Farmer? I keep meaning to pick up one of her books, and that one looked particularly interesting.

Bleak House is about eight or nine hundred pages in small close-set Penguin edition. I read most of it in two days after a two-week vacation, because it turned out to be just the wrong kind of prose for train rides from London to Venice to Berlin to Prague to London. So I had assignment catch-up to do, and I lay down in bed and read for two days straight.

It was wonderful.

And it has one of the most magnificent opening paragraphs ever.