Great Expectations

From Goodreads

Great Expectations
Charles Dickens

Great Expectations is wordy enough without me bloviating about it. The story is well written, tragic and worth reading. But, sometimes reading Dickens is like admiring a massive painting, one square centimeter at a time.

I had never read the "original" ending before this one. I think that it fit better with the overall flow of the novel as a whole rather than what Dickens saw as a happy ending. The problem is Estella. She remains cold, proud and unbreakable. But then, in the happy ending her suffering breaks her. In the original she is bent, not broken. It just makes more sense that way.

The Salmon of Doubt

With a name like The Salmon of Doubt I wasn't sure what to expect. I mean, I've read nearly every major work of Douglas Adams, but this one wasn't giving any clues as to what was going to happen by the title. That's just a part of the charm in this book.

Here's my Goodreads review: This book is an anthology; therefore it's impossible to review as a whole. The Dirk Gently draft at the end is very humorous and very unfinished. I understand why Adams struggled a bit with it. It certainly felt mixed up between The Hitchhiker world and The Gently world. Had he finished the novel it would have been on par with most of his other work, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The other bits of this book are essays, interviews and just random scraps of thoughts found on Adams' macs after he passed away. I'll tell you my favorites were some of his little blurbs as they gave me some insight into his thinking. That was fun. His essays were what you'd expect from anyone who writes essays. They fell on a spectrum. I don't adhere to all of Adams' worldview, but some of his arguments for it were weightier than others (much as some theistic arguments are weightier than others). The interviews are as good as the interviewer was. 

Some of the highlights for me are the biscuits at the train station because that is flat out one of the funniest stories I've ever read, the puddle analogy against a teleological worldview because it makes me think even when I disagree and his story about the manta rays because it highlights how good stories can be about nature. If more conservationists were like Adams there would be less need of them.

I really did enjoy much of the book. There were parts that had me rolling and laughing out loud to myself. Then there were parts that were humdrum. Here are some of my favorite parts in my first reading (I plan on rereading it at least 41 times to get to the meaning of everything). In writing some of this, I hope to glean some of the storytelling tricks Adams uses to employ in my own writing.

Fifteen Second Timespan

In describing himself and his nose Adams writes, "One of the more curious features of my nose is that it doesn't admit any air. This is hard to understand or even believe. The problem goes back a very long way to when I was a small boy living in my grandmother's house. My grandmother was the local representative of the RSPCA, which meant the house was always full of badly damaged dogs and cats, even the occasional badger, stoat, or pigeon. Some of them were damaged physically, some psychologically, but the effect they had on me was to seriously damage my attention span. Because the air was thick with animal hair and dust, my nose was continually inflamed and runny, and every fifteen seconds I would sneeze. Any though I could not explore, develop, and bring to some logical conclusion within fifteen second would therefore be forcibly expelled from my head, along with a great deal of mucus"(Adams, 13). 

P.G. Wodehouse

Douglas Adams and I both have a strong affinity for Kurt Vonnegut. Adams lists his favorite authors as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, P.G. Wodehouse and Ruth Rendell. I'll admit to have never heard of Rendell or Wodehouse. Wodehouse is now however on my periphery as someone I'd like to read. (Rendell doesn't really strike me as all that interesting and while I may get around to reading something of hers and have my mind completely blown, I've got a lot of other books I want to read until I get to hers). Dickens is fantastic. He is very wordy and very descriptive, which slows down my reading; but, there is no denying his incredible storytelling. Jane Austen is on my list for 2017. And, as previously stated, Vonnegut is one of my favorites. Adams writes about P.G. Wodehouse's last novel, Sunset at Blandings, as being unfinished, "It is unfinished not just in the sense that it suddenly, heartbreakingly for those of us who love this man and work, stops in mudflow, but in the more important sense that the text up to that point is unfinished. A first draft for Wodehouse was a question of getting the essential ingredients of a story organized - its plot structure, its characters and their comings and goings, the mountains they climb and the cliffs they fall off. It is the next stage of writing - the relentless revising, refining, and polishing - that turned his works into the marvels of language we know and love" (Adams, 63). Sadly, and rather poignantly, this is somewhat how I feel about The Salmon of Doubt (at least the Dirk Gently part).

Life as a matter of opinion & The predestined puddle

I find it somewhat unsettling that I am frequently drawn to writers and thinkers that I am thoroughly at odds with on some fundamental level. Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy was what got me into philosophy in the first place and I've read much of his other work as well. Vonnegut and Adams are among my favorite authors from the relatively contemporary period we live in. Voltaire is one of my favorite authors of all time. Russell, Vonnegut and Adams were all atheists and Voltaire wasn't exactly friendly to orthodox Christianity. I don't know why I seem to be drawn to those who have such vastly different views from me on things that are as crucial and foundational as a belief in God, but I am. I think that is because I'm drawn to interesting writing and ideas and while I may agree with a sermon by the average preacher, unless they present it in an interesting manner I simply nod along. With Adams, he makes strong arguments for atheism that are challenging and I like to be challenged. In his speech Is there an artificial god? he notes, "without a god, life is only a matter of opinion" (Adams, 128). I think that he's right. If there is no god, the definition of everything becomes subjective - including the fundamental question of what is living and what is not. I find his notion of where did the idea of God come from as somewhat shallow, man looks around and sees a great world and as masters of that great world it must be made for us. I don't find that very convincing or challenging. He makes other points that are challenging. This just isn't one of them. But, the notion that the meaning of life is purely subjective without the existence of God is an intriguing philosophical problem to me. His parable of the puddle is a better nuanced version of this argument. The puddle finds itself in a hole exactly the shape that is suited for it and thinks that this world was made for him. As the puddle evaporates it hangs on to the notion for dear life that the world is made for him, even as he is receding into nothingness. That's a challenging idea. That's a difficult one for the theistic minded man to contend with. It calls for better apologetics (but not new theology). 

The Cookies Story at the Train Station

This might be one of my favorite bits of the book. Adams states that in 1976 he went to a train station and bought a bag of biscuits and a paper and sat down across from a man. The man opened a package of biscuits and began to eat one. Adams, in shock at having someone eat one of his biscuits, doesn't say anything but eats a biscuit himself. This back and forth goes on until the whole package is finished. The other man leaves without having said a word to Adams. Adams is in disbelief as to what had just happened (as was, presumably, the other man). When Adams finally gets up to go he picks up the paper to discover the packet of biscuits he bought is actually under his newspaper. "The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who's had the same exact story, only he doesn't have the punch line" (Adams, 151). This is seriously one of the funniest things I've ever read.

The Letter to David Vogel at Walt Disney

When Adams and Disney are having problems with making Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into a movie, Adams writes Vogel about the lack of communication between them and how it's making it difficult. So he ends the letter with a plead to get together to discuss the movie and a page and a half of ways of reaching Adams. He gives him his email, assistant's number, office fax, his home number, UK cell phone, US cellphone, his French home number, his wife's office number, his film agent's number, his book agent's number (office, home and other office), his producer's number, his director's number (office, home and cellphone), another woman's office, home and cellphone number, his UK producer's number (office, home and cell), his mother's number, his sister's work and home number, his nanny's number, his next door neighbor's number (work and home) and some 'restaurants I might conceivably be at', including the telephone number for Sainsbury's '(supermarket where I shop; they can always page me)' and his website. Too funny. "[Editor's Note: This letter had the desired effect. David Vogel responded, resulting in a productive meeting that pushed the movie forward]" (Adams, 171). Who says sarcasm never worked?

I also enjoyed his incomplete novel and his short story about Genghis Khan, but that is enough for now.

An assessment of A Tale of Two Cities

It has been some time since I made a literature post. The reasons for this are numerous but I will be brief in my excuses.

First, I got a puppy. Having a puppy that was restless meant that the only way to calm him down a bit was to turn out the lights. When my reading light was on he felt he was free to get up and move around (which entailed his teething mouth moving around on any and every object within his grasp). So I turned out the lights resulting in a loss of my nightly reading time. This occurred about a day after I started A Tale of Two Cities.

Second, I became lazy. I don't just read at night; but, that was when I did a majority of it. I was lazy and didn't make up for my lost time in other parts of the day. That was intellectually lazy.

Third, Dickens suffers from the same disease that I suffer from in writing, only his is a much more refined version. That is to say, he is wordy. While my wordiness often leads to useless ramblings down rabbit holes that don't exactly push the story along but serve as self-aggrandizing ornamentation his wordiness is wrapped in an incredible attention to detail. I found this to be a factor in my slowness of reading the book. The first book and the second book up until the storming of the Bastille was crafted incredibly to transport me into the period in such a way that I felt there. But also in a way to make me feel like I was trapped there. But after the storming of the Bastille and throughout the third book it felt like the pace of the story was livelier and quickened. I read this part much more swiftly.

As far as an assessment, who am I to critique? The story is powerful, fantastic and incredibly crafted. I enjoyed the third book immensely and felt a strong satisfaction in completing it. In my darker moments I wondered if I was like Sydney Carton of chapter 20 - no good, but desiring to be good. Upon completion of the book I felt as if I wasn't at all like Mr. Carton; I am not capable of such a sacrifice.

But I did have an idea for a book while reading this one. I will call it A Tale: A Novel Destruction. What I propose to do is to take every fourth word of the book and mix them up to create a story that is nothing like the original. I'm not sure if I can actually do it, but I'd like to try. I've heard it said that Charles Dickens is the greatest storyteller in the English language. Maybe I can be a quarter of the man he was.

Day 2 of London

(Originally Written April 4, 2015)

Day two was started by a big English breakfast at the Hotel and a couple of cups of tea. After gorging ourselves we went to Old Spitalfields Market and shopped around for lots of goodies and trinkets. It was a pretty neat place. After that we headed over to Hunterian Museum, which due to a massive underground fire was closed. At a loss we popped into The Ship Tavern to recalibrate and figure out what to do next. That being said, we did stumble upon "The Old Curiosity Shop" made famous by Charles Dickens.

At The Ship Tavern, I had my first Scotch Egg and my first Cask Ale - delish! After that we headed to Twinings Tea parlor, saw some really cool old buildings and I managed to break Erin's phone while we were searching for Temple Church. After a bit of mourning and bickering we headed over to Saint Paul's Cathedral, which was closed for some private event. From there we headed over the Thames and saw The Globe Theater and went into the gift shop. On the walking bridge we got our first glimpse of the London Bridge and Erin was attacked by a bird.

From there hoofed it over to the George Inn for fish & chips and more cask ale. After dinner, it was time to see Big Ben and the London Eye at night time, which was gorgeous. There was a desire to continue touring, but our feet wouldn't let us considering the 10-12 miles they had carried us, so we hopped on our first double decker bus and proceeded to get lost. Finally we found a tube station and made it back to our hotel.