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Post by Vorchia on Jan 29, 2006 15:15:59 GMT -5
Is anyone in for another Victorian Classic? I'm reading it right now. Yes I had a nice little trip to a book sale. ;D I like it so far but I'm only at page 44 right now. I suppose everyone knows this book and is capable of giving some form of a comment, no? ;D
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Post by utoraptor3000 on Jan 30, 2006 6:31:36 GMT -5
i love that story. and i have seen the film!
it's really cool
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Buttercup
Junior Scholar
Ain't life grand?
Posts: 316
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Post by Buttercup on Jan 31, 2006 19:43:31 GMT -5
Finally, a book I have access to...I will read it and let you know about it! Stay tuned!
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Post by Vorchia on Feb 1, 2006 3:53:53 GMT -5
LOL! Well YOU can start a book discussion thread too about a book you're reading!
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Rosa
Junior Scholar
Posts: 200
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Post by Rosa on Feb 1, 2006 12:23:58 GMT -5
Yes, I've read Oliver Twist and it's one of my favorites out of Charles Dickens stories. I'll forever be amazed at how that man could come up with such complicated plots and write such thick books! If only I could write that well.
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Post by Vorchia on Feb 6, 2006 14:02:03 GMT -5
Rosa if you could write that well, AND draw as well as you do, you'd scare mr Gurney yet. I finished reading the book. I find this is one of Dickens more readable books, along with 'A Tale of Two Cities'. Thankfully my copy has lists of slang and of old fashioned words in the back so I didn't get TOO lost. It is the kind of book that is hard to put down despite how old the story is. Its a clear case of 'I should have been reading my sciencebooks but couldn't stop reading my literature'. I've never seen any movie or play of it. I don't pay much attention to plays and movies anyway, I prefer books. Books tend to be cheaper.
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Kaak
Dolphinback
Posts: 39
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Post by Kaak on Feb 10, 2006 17:55:17 GMT -5
If we're not actually posting bits to talk about them, lemme know and I'll kill the entry :)
I try to read when I get a break and I spent two days on the back of a pickup truck with a pile of cammies, so I had a lot of time to read. I can't really take more than a couple hours of Dickens in one sitting, though. I slow way down. My book's like yours in giving me the slang translations, Vorchia, except it's got apostrophes and footnotes on each page. I was surprised how much of it I didn't know.
I'm just to the bit where Oliver's been chased, shot, and is being tended by the family with the storytelling butler. I have some first reactions to it... I'm usually very skeptical about stories where some orphan is maligned and then, finally, given comfort. I can't imagine being in England that time of its publication and liking the book, or being able to accept it in a social light, because that's the whole society destroying the poor, the orphans, and it's a story about corruption. That's huge. I don't think I've read a modern book about modern life and how much the middle classes allow the poor to fall by the wayside, especially not in such language as Dickens uses.
For example, opening lines of chapter two:
For the next eight or ten months, Oliver was the victim of a systematic course of treachery and deception. He was brought up by hand.
And to be totally clear, Dickens gives the party line while showing the truth, which reveals the party line to be a sham.
Party line...
Sevenpence- halfpenny's worth per week is a good round diet for a child; a great deal may be got for sevenpence- halfpenny; quite enough to overload its somtach and make it uncomfortable.
Truth...
When a child had contrived to exist upon the smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was usually summoned into another world and there gathered to the fathers it had never known in this.
But never from the lack of food, right? Always something else. Ugh.
I wish I could write sarcastic, biting exposition like that. :7
I like it. I'm solidly on the side of 'little Oliver' and I hope he'll will turn out all right in the end, because I haven't actually ever finished it or seen the play :D
(And thank goodness I know Kaak never had to fear that sort of treatment. A purely human institution, beauracratic slavery, I think. I can't imagine a saurian having anything to do with it.)
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SilvanoshiS
Apprentice
flightless and loving it
Posts: 143
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Post by SilvanoshiS on Feb 12, 2006 3:21:13 GMT -5
I really enjoyed this book. It's been a while since I read it, but it is one of the few Dicken's books I like because it was one of a handful he didn't write as many words as possible so that the paper these were published in would pay him more. True story, he gave the chapters to a journal/paper and they published 1 chapter a week or so, and he got paid. he would draw out some so that he would get paid more because there were more chapters. Fun, but selfish, I think.
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