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I picked up this book in a bookstore (if you can believe it), not really thinking I'd buy such a big pile of pages in classical English, figuring it would bore the hell out of me.

I read the first page.

I then proceeded to the counter, and bought it.

This is the beginning of my love story with "David Copperfield", an absolute favorite. It takes a particular mindset to read it I think, so it took me a while to finish it, matching my reading moments with that mindset as much as possible. You need a romantic side and you need to be able to get in touch with it in order to enjoy this book, but if you give this tale a chance, it will nurture that sensitive side and make you get tears of joy.

This book is a biography of a wonderful, semi-fictional person, David Copperfield, whose ordeals and adventures are based on those experienced by Charles Dickens. David's thoughts are generous and because this book is written from his perspective, everything he describes around him is depicted in their best possible light. The world is such a nice place through his eyes, even in the most dreary situations of poverty, abandonment and death of loved ones. Plenty of songs of happiness and love are sung in this book, but like in every life, there is not just that. Sadness, death, loss, heartache become beautiful because of their purity and their core of warmth, a warmth so well expressed in this book. Betrayal and jealousy become even uglier when put next to the purer feelings.

It hasn't always been an easy read. Some passages are rather slow and a rare couple of segments that were meant to be funny have somehow lost their edge (most humourous instances still retain their power over your mouth corners and unshaken belly, though. They will yield, I assure you!). The local dialects in which some of the protagonists speak sometimes make it very difficult to understand for a non-native English speaker like myself.

I have read this book with a little notebook next to me to take down the most memorable quotes. It was difficult not to just simply copy entire pages at times. Here are some of my favorite quotes -who are really stories in themselves- which show the timeless humour and the great pen of an author who has shown that the most naive thing to be is to be anything but continuously amazed with the wonders all around you:

“Be thankful for me, if you have a kind heart, as I think you have, that while I know well what I am, I can be cheerful and endure it all. I am thankful for myself, at any rate, that I can find my tiny way through the world, without being beholden to anyone; and that in return for all that is thrown at me, in folly or vanity, as I go along, I can throw bubbles back.�

"Very much admired, indeed, the young woman was. What with her dress; what with the air and sun; what with being made so much of; what with this, that, and the other; her merits really attracted general notice."

"This country I am come to conquer! Have you honours? Have you riches? Have you posts of profitable pecuniary emolument? Let them be brought forward. They are mine!"

"Oh the river! I know it's like me! I know that I belong to it. I know that it's the natural company of such as I am! It comes from country places, where there was no harm in it - and it creeps through the dismal streets, defiled and miserable - and it goes away, like my life, to a great sea that is always troubled and I feel that I must go with it."

"If, any sunny forenoon, she had spread a little pair of wings and flown away before my eyes, I don't expect I should have regarded it as much more than I had had reason to expect."

"And if ever, in my life, I have had a void made in my heart, I had one made that day."

"I shall never forget the waking next morning; the being cheerful and fresh for the first moment, and then the being weighed down by the stale and dismal oppression of remembrance."

"It would be no pleasure to a London tradesman to sell anything which was what he pretended it was."

"...and that she desired her compliments, which was a polite fiction on my part."

"When I woke next morning, I was resolute to declare my passion to Dora, and know my fate. Happiness or misery was now the question. There was no other question that I knew of in the world, and only Dora could give the answer to it."

"Love must suffer in this stern world; it ever had been so, it ever would be so. No matter. Hearts confined by cobwebs would burst at last, and then Love was avenged."

If you love Love, with the big L, you'll love this Book.