David Copperfield

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, 974 pages.
Our seventh big-book summer is over and we finally got to a Dickens novel.
I can't remember if this is the novel that my sister got when she was very young, or if it was Oliver Twist, either way there was always a fair amount of Dickens around the house when I was growing up, and I always meant to read it, but never quite got around to it. I read (along with about half of everybody, it seems) Great Expectations in High School, but then didn't read any of Dickens's larger novels until the 1990s when I read, and quite enjoyed, Bleak House. The characters in Copperfield, especially Traddles, Aunt Betsey, and the Micawbers are quite charming. Uriah Heep is as bad as you'd ever heard. David's obliviousness to Agnes and his own heart are a bit hard to take after a while, but all-in-all a good read.

The Fortune Hunter

The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin  473 pp.

Charlotte Baird is an English heiress who is more interested in the new art of photography than the social obligations her family and status require of her. The Empress Elizabeth of Austria, known as Sisi, is beautiful and has an independent nature also and is bored by her life in the court of her much older husband Emperor Franz Joseph. Sisi visits England because she is an avid horsewoman and plans to participate in fox hunting season. Captain Bay Middleton is young, handsome and the best horseman in England. He is smitten with Charlotte and wants to marry her but her family disapproves because of his history as a womanizer. More complications ensue when Bay is given the job of being the Empress' pilot during the hunts.  The Empress is known for always getting what she wants and what she wants is Bay. All in all it's a pretty typical love/break-up/reunite story but with the addition of horses and photographs. I was a bit disappointed in the ending and don't think this was as good a novel as Goodwin's previous one, The American Heiress. Once again there were a couple minor historical details that were in error like a character singing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" which did not become popular until 1904, three years after the death of Queen Victoria who is very much alive in this book.

Middlemarch

Middlemarch by George Eliot, 827 pages

For those of you not already reading Middlemarch in our adult summer reading program, Middlemarch is a fictional town set in the English countryside in the early-ish 1800s and focuses on some of the more well to do families that live there. We first meet Dorothea Brooke, a young woman with the lofty goal of learning and making life better for those around her, but decides to do that by marrying Mr. Casaubon, a man almost three times her age. Then there is Fred Vincy, at the crossroads of his life: in love with his childhood friend, Mary Garth, but bent towards self-destruction through gambling and idleness. And then there is Tertius Lydgate, a doctor who moves to Middlemarch with the plan of bringing a new practice of medicine to the masses, and with the equally lofty goal of making some new scientific breakthrough. Of course, there are many characters I'm leaving out (Will Ladislaw, Rosamond Vincy, Nicholas Bulstrode, Peter Featherstone, Camden Farebrother...), but most of the action revolves around these three. We've spent a lot of time discussing how this book is considered a staggering work of genius, and while I'm not sure I can speak to that, I can recognize why it's considered a classic. Eliot manages to juggle all of these characters and their pains and dreams and suffering without dropping the ball with any of them. With a narrator's eye view of each of these characters, she manages to inspire pity and sympathy for some of the more awful ones (see our summer reading blog for more on that). And though her writing tends toward the analytical, I still managed to find myself sucked into what would happen - if Dorothea would ever realize that she loved Will, if Lydgate would ever manage to out connive his wife, if Fred would ever pull his life together to make it with Mary. Many in our discussions on the book have mentioned that they feel the need to reread this book, and I agree (though I definitely want to read it in print and not as an ebook). If you're a fan of Victorian novels, but haven't read this one yet, go for it! And join us in August for our last discussion and tell us what you think.

The American Heiress

The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin  468 pp.

In the late nineteenth century, Cora Cash is the lone offspring of the wealthy Cash family whose fortune dwarfs many of the "old money" families. Her mother's ostentation knows no bounds. Cora and her mother travel to Europe in search of a titled husband as do many American heiresses of the time. A riding accident results in the chance meeting between Cora and Ivo, the Duke of Wareham. The meeting results in a romance and marriage. Cora has the money to renovate the decaying family castle and revive the Wareham's social standing. However, she must learn to navigate the tightly bound class traditions of her new country. There is romance, infidelity, snooty aristocrats, "shocking" breaches of etiquette, and everything a novel like this should have. Aside from a few historical inaccuracies such as Sherman burning plantations in Virginia and the Prince of Wales and Prince Edward at one point seeming to be two different people, this is an enjoyable novel.

From Hell

From Hell
by Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell
540 pages

"Jack the Ripper", a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in the Whitechapel district of London between 1888 and 1889, was never conclusively identified.  The mysterious and particularly gruesome nature of his crimes gave birth to a character that has filled the imaginations (and pockets) of true crime authors and conspiracy theorists ever since.  This graphic novel is a piece of historical fiction that not only tells a dark, captivating story, but is also critical of the industry that grows from the ugliest acts of man, while being self-aware enough to admit that it is apart of that same phenomenon.




Alan Moore borrows from established facts and intriguing, albeit conspiratorial speculation, to create a work with themes encompassing the occult, secret societies, and class antagonism in Victorian era England.

This is a good read for anyone with a dark bent when it comes to literary taste.  Though I really enjoyed it,  I felt it was a tad cumbersome; there are a lot of characters that end up being of little significance and it threw my attention off when it came to following the story.  Also, watching prostitutes get drunk and go with strange men into lonely, dirty back alleys got a little tiresome.  We get it: life's hard in the slums of London's east end.  But once this is sufficiently established, further illustrations of depravity lose their impact.  Then again, maybe that's the point.

I plan on rereading this at some point in the future.  And if it's worth a second read, it was, and is, worth a first.