David Copperfield

And once again, the iPhone Kindle format comes through -- I finished a major Dickens novel without any major difficulties!  I'm not sure whether I just found David Copperfield more readable than Bleak House, or my tastes have improved, or the iPhone format really does help me focus and feel like I'm making progress in the novel.   

[Side note: I keep forgetting that a Google search of "David Copperfield images" tends to pull up pictures of the magician.]

One way or another, I actually enjoyed David Copperfield.  Other than the fact that I hated Dora.  HATED that character.  Part of my ambivalence over Dickens in general is due to his sentimentality -- it really gets to me.  And Dora has to be one of his most sentimentalized (and inane) characters!  I realize that that's the point -- David doesn't end up calling her his "child-wife" for no reason -- but she drove me crazy!  And I just plain hate having my heartstrings yanked by Dickens in saccharine sentences like,

 "I wondered what she was thinking about, as I glanced in admiring silence at the little soft hand travelling up the row of buttons on my coat, and at the clustering hair that lay against my breast, and at the lashes of her downcast eyes, slightly rising as they followed her idle fingers.  At length her eyes were lifted up to mine, and she stood on tiptoe to give me, more thoughtfully than usual, that precious little kiss -- once, twice, three times -- and went out of the room."

I guess that isn't SO bad... but it's the best/worst example I could find quickly on my iPhone [one disadvantage of the Kindle thing -- you can't "flip through" the pages].

After prose that cloying, I feel like I should go read some Hemingway.

On the other hand, I loved David's aunt, Betsy Trotwood -- what a character!  I especially love how that tough old bird has such a tender, compassionate heart -- it was quite a relief when David (I keep wanting to call him Pip!) ends up in her care after all the travails of his miserable childhood.

Now I'm on to The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.  Honestly, it's not my favorite so far.  I'd better read something non-Victorian after this one...