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How are you liking this one? It's one of my favorites of the classics.

It's, like, the best book in the world. I want to have it surgically attached to my face.

LOL! It IS fantastic! That's quite a mental picture though :P
I watched an old black and white movie of it the other night and it made me not only want to reread it but to watch the newer version of the movie with Gwenyth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke.

Kirs brought the movie up last night...I'm deeply suspicious of it. Not sure Paltrow has the heartlessness to play Estella. (I suspect she's got a change of heart coming, but she'll still need heartlessness to set it up.) And I can't see Hawke handling Pip either; I want Michael Cera in that role.

I really loved the movie but it's been years since I've seen it and I'm not sure that I've seen it since I read the book so I'm not the best one to comment on it...

Dickens ROCKS!!!

You know, I've been wondering about that. Going into Oliver Twist I was certainly aware that I'd noticed anti-Semitism in Dickens before, but I didn't remember anything...beyond the pale, I guess. This is uncomfortable to admit, but casual anti-Semitism is so rank in Victorian lit that it all starts to run together. I deeply wish I'd paid more attention and marked anti-Semitic passages throughout; it would be useful to go back and pull them all together and see what kind of picture I ended up with.

So you're saying that the anti-Semitism here does strike you as beyond the pale? Would you do me a huge favor and make a note of the next time you see something cringeworthy?

I can even repay you. Have you read Count of Monte Cristo recently?

Because it turns out that Dumas totally loves vampires! In Chapter 34, Lord Byron's mistress meets the Count, and says, "He looks to me like Lord Ruthven in flesh and blood...Lord Byron swore to me that he believed in vampires. He even told me that he had seen them and described how they look - and that was it, exactly!" There's a long section where Dumas basically indulges himself by rambling about vampires. It's a really interesting passage.

Footnote 4 to that chapter (in the Penguin edition) goes into the "extraordinary vogue for vampire stories" at length, mentioning a couple of stage adaptations of Polidori's The Vampyre. (Have you gotten Dracula's Guest yet?)

I don't know if you're just entertaining yourself with this vampire thing or if you intend to write some sort of paper on it; if it's the latter case, you might be able to work Count of Monte Cristo in. If you flip through Ch. 34 to the vampire passage, you won't spoil anything too badly. (Assuming you know the basic plot of the book.) Has nothing to do with Vic sexuality or non-magical vampires, though, unfortunately.

I didn't realize you were elsewhere. Where are you?

We should talk about the Polidori story, anyway, since it's such a landmark. And then I thought we'd just sortof trickle on, nudging each other whenever we happen to have read one of them. But if you're planning on actually reading the whole thing through, that totally screws up my plan.

All of Varney? Wow. Does it get wicked dull and repetitious? I had a feeling, just from the first chapter, that it might. And...slightly campy?

And I have a suspicion that this isn't the last I'm going to hear about vampires from Dumas. There's a character actually named Luigi Vampa (how's that for a name?) who will probably be important later.

Okay, I may have missed a step: what are you doing at URI? What happened to Nazarene?

Count is a ton of fun. It was oversold to me - people couldn't stop telling me how much I'd like it - but it's actually living up to its reputation. Man, am I having a good time.

Aaaaand now I'm overselling it myself. Nice job, me.

I thought that surgically attached idea might have been an exaggeration, but now that I've read it I realize nope, it's not!

Gonna quibble: Dombey and Son is his best.