It will soon be about 200 months since I began to read Dickens' famous novel, Great Expectations, at the suggestion of a young friend who is now no longer quite so young.
Why, you might ask, has it taken me so long to read the book? There are all sorts of excuses: work, life, restarting it several times in order to refresh my memory, switching from my hectic daily life to the leisurely pace of nineteenth-century literature...but the best reason I can think of for my slowness can be found on page two of the book.
"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"When I first came to this passage, I stopped. I read it again. I'd never read prose like this, that was so utterly poetic, so filled with rhythm, and which created so evocative a scene. I read it aloud. I copied it down and posted it above my desk. Later, I memorized it. This one snippet from a scene had grabbed me and so thoroughly mesmerized me that I've been reading that same passage over and over for the last 200 months.
A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
That's my excuse for not finishing Great Expectations.
What is your favorite Dickens' work? Why?
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