bleak house.
I am, at the moment, happily immersed in the world of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. I love Dickens. One of my top five favorite books of all time is David Copperfield, and who didn’t grudgingly love Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities when you were made to read them in high school?
Mom Gentino read Bleak House for her book club last year and convinced me to try it. Try it, I did. It was one of the first (free!) books I downloaded when I got my Kindle. And I got exactly 34 percent through it before giving up. There are so many characters to keep straight. And five hundred pages of them felt so daunting.
She told me I was going about it all wrong; I needed to watch the BBC television series first to get the characters down, then go back to the book.
Well, she was right. Fast forward to this year, and David bought Bleak House for me on iTunes. It’s eight hour-long episodes, and he has humored me by watching them with me this past week. He’s not one for BBC movies, but we’ve watched six episodes, and I think he likes it as much as I do.
So I’m back to the book. I started at the beginning again, am now 40 percent through, and finding it hard to put down.
You can rent the show on iTunes for 99 cents an episode, or buy the whole series for $14.99. Or, I bet, get it through the public library. And yes, that’s Gillian Anderson from The X Files who plays Lady Dedlock. She’s awesome.
6 Comments
Evie
Oh my gosh! I’ve watched that series twice now- love it! And I have it loaded on my kindle…maybe I should actually read it now. 🙂
julie gentino
Yes! You should read it! It will make you so happy. I thought of you and Aunt Valerie when I watched the Elizabeth Gaskell movies … North and South, Cranford, and Wives and Daughters. Have you guys seen those?
Evie
I’ve seen Cranford and Wives and Daughters, but I’ll have to check out North and South!! We just got back from New Smyrna Beach & I thought of you the whole time- and watching Emma 🙂
julie gentino
yay, you will LOVE North and South. I think it’s the best of the three. miss you tons, cuz!
Lauren
My in-laws got me this version of Bleak House for my birthday this year- we watched it together while they were here on furlough this summer! And yeah, I heard the same thing: watch the movie, THEN read the book 🙂 oh, and we watched North and South on Netflix too- great minds think alike, I guess 🙂
julie gentino
so fun, laur! i am almost finished with bleak house the book. i think you’d really enjoy it!