all things Great Expectations

plus other current reads

It’s been a long time since we read anything by Dickens in our group,¹ but it’s not for lack of trying. I’m pretty sure I’ve put one of his books in every poll, and we finally got a winner.

I was already in the middle of another book by Dickens and really tried to finish it before we started this one. But alas…I am now going deeper in Great Expectations which I’ve read before, and going wide in Barnaby Rudge, which I haven’t. I don’t recommend reading two books by Dickens at once, but at least I was a) far enough into Barnaby Rudge to feel established in the plot and characters, and b) familiar enough with Great Expectations to not confuse it with the other. Still…don’t try it at home, kids.

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

For fun, here are my current fiction reads — I have blown through the first three Emma Lion books and am on the fourth which is on my nightstand instead of in this photo:

And for mostly ministry and Bible school, here’s my current non-fiction stack:

Quick note on Foucault’s Pendulum (it’s pronounced foo-KOH, you’re welcome): This has been on my list for a while but I’m not sure how it got there. At only 50ish pages in, so far about 30% of it is over my head but I’m still fascinated.

UPDATE: At 140 pages in, I quit it. I don’t mind the out of the box theories and wild associations, but when the author starts manipulating the reader with his atheistic beliefs that Jesus’ existence is a Celtic myth, he loses both my respect for him as a historian and my attention for whatever else he has to say. I tossed it; do not recommend.

vocab in Great Expectations

But! Here are some fun words we’ve come across in GE that we don’t see every day:

• ablution: washing or cleansing

• caparisoned: richly ornamented

• connubial: relating to marriage

• erudition: learning or scholarship

• execrate: denounce, abhor, or evoke a curse upon

• imbrue: to saturate or stain

• myrmidon: an unquestioning follower; sycophant, lackey (see the Greek mythological background here)

• perspicuity: clearness of expression or thought

• suborn: to persuade someone to commit a crime

• trenchant: keen or forceful

…and a playlist

I thought this would be fun:

Upon second thought, I think “With or Without You” (also by U2) evokes the mood of Great Expectations more than anything else I suggested. It begins hauntingly, and still is full of all the gloomy, foggy angst that imbues the book.

But! MustangSammy found this to edify our Dickensian reading time:

Also, here’s “Death and the Maiden” by Schubert:

quotes

A significant theme of Great Expectations is how the people and places we are surrounded by impact us. Like so:

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so strong that it became infectious, and I caught it.

— from chapter 8

What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural light from the misty yellow rooms?

— from chapter 12

Things like this remind me to consider the environment I’m making for my kids, and surrounding myself with.

Also, this morning I took down a flowerpot from the top of my kitchen cabinets and it looked like it came straight out of Miss Havisham’s sitting room. I immediately dusted everything because that is not an atmosphere I want sneaking in here.

If you can’t get to be oncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through going crooked.

…

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life.

Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been.

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

— Charles Dickens, from Great Expectations (chapter 9)

a few more shenanigans, GE and otherwise:

update

A bonus for those of you who’ve endured to the very bottom of this post:

We now have a chat available here on Substack, instead of only on Telegram. I resisted for a long time but it just makes sense to have the chat available where our blog already is, yes? So please pop in, join us, and fire at will. BRING MEMES.

from the Telegram group, a question:

Have any of you seen Dickensian? We’ve probably talked about it before; it’s an 8-part miniseries that pulls together most of Dickens’ works (but primarily Great Expectations, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, and Christmas Carol) into one interwoven, fascinating storyline. With the exception of a couple characters, it is SO WELL DONE and gives a brilliant origin story to those four books.

In the last (?) episode, it illustrates exactly how and why Miss Havisham became what she is when we meet her in chapter eight of Great Expectations, down to the smallest detail of her only wearing one shoe. As a Dickens fan, it is one of the most stunning scenes I’ve ever seen — watching her transformation was a mindblowing “aha” moment for me.

I recommend waiting to watch it till after you’ve finished those four books, though. It’s probably still enjoyable but you’ll get so much more out of it when you pick up on all the references.

Check it out on IMDB here.

upcoming

We have two months left of Great Expectations but next on our list is Peace Like a River by Leif Enger, which we’ll be starting at the end of June and reading for seven weeks. You have loads of time to grab a copy; here’s where you can get it new or used at ThriftBooks.

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That’s everything I’ve got for you this month. May your bookstack be ever growing, and may your schedule give you plenty of time to tackle it.

Happy reading,

Shannon

1. The last time we read Dickens was toward the end of 2023, when we read Tale of Two Cities for the second time, and started this blog. This is another post about it: