Roundup: May 15, 2023

I like big books and I cannot lie

It’s me. Hi.

During the pandemic, I started reading gigantic classics. You know, Dickens, Eliot, Melville, Sendahl, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Trollope. Things like that. I wanted to read books that would take a long time to get through (we were on lockdown, after all) and that would be nothing at all like the modern world.

If you haven’t read these books since your school days, and even if you relied on Cliff’s Notes back then, consider picking them up now. When you first read them in school, the language seems so strange, and the situations seem so far off. After years of watching historical movies and living life, it’s easier to understand 19th century grammar and the choices people make.

A few warnings, if you take up this suggestion. First, there’s an unbelievable amount of racism, classism, etc. in these stories. If you’re easily offended, you’ll be offended. There’s also a lot of cluelessness. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens has a female narrator, but it’s clear he knows nothing about the interior lives of women. Finally, back in the day, people wanted thick books. They didn’t have TV or phones, so they had time to kill. Many writers syndicated their stories a chapter at a time to newspapers and magazines before compiling them into book form, so there’s filler. Moby Dick has a few amazing chapters squished between pages and pages of little details about whales and ships that you can skip over. Bleak House has random stories about miscellaneous characters that are fun to read about but do nothing to advance the plot.

I love these books in large part because of how they explore class and money. These are timeless issues! I also love the details, from the names Charles Dickens gives his characters to the descriptions of the clothes people wear.

These books make for cheap reading, too. Almost by definition, classics are in the public domain, and Project Gutenberg has electronic versions of most of them. I use a free app, Calibre, to move them to my Kindle library because the Kindle interface sucks. With Calibre, it’s easy to convert and load different file formats onto different brands of e-readers, and it works with Windows, Mac, and Linux. I’m a fan.