I finished Bleak House a few days ago and have taken up with War and Peace again. This time I'm finding War and Peace (the Norton edition, longer pages) much more enjoyable, (when I say this time I mean picking up from where I left off last time, not re-reading it). I am in a better frame of mind to read it now, I'm in the mood for reading large books, I think I'm going to read another Dickens when I have finished, at the mo I am a third of the way through W+P.
I found a good place for online books at the Universtiy of Adelaide Or here is a list of books there by theme (of course there's the ol' Gutie among countless others, but I have found things here which aren't at Gutenberg e.g. War With the Newts which I read a long time ago and meant to re-read but have never found again, I think it might be out of print) The Crime and Mystery section has some stuff that I want to read, as does the Russian Lit. section all Dostoyevsky Lermontov, Turgenyev and the like.
Aaaanyway, I feel like throwing myself into 19th or early 20th C. books at the moment (I read most of the book as a physical book, and some of it online, it's nice to be able to do this.), not sure why I am shunning contemporary things, if I am shunning them; I don't think to focus on some things is necessarily to shun the other things, but I do wonder why I am more eager to read things from round about the 19th C. I think temporal distance is a kind of safety device, but there's more to my interest than just that, cos I'm not reading stuff from like 1700, I like the rules and the structures of society, I mean I like reading about them, I wouldn't want to live with them. And of course reading about the past illuminates the present, reading about past societies, their values, their unwritten rules etc. with a view to the present and how life is lived now is fascinating.
As I conjectured before I can't be arsed to really go into Bleak House though interesting it is, though I shall say a bit about it. So for those (if anyone is reading this) who couldn't care less about Bleak House stop reading here, the rest of this post is all Bleak house from hereon.)
I found the character Skimpole very intruiging and was disappointed that Jarndyce didn't "have it out" with him about his pretensions as an adult child with few wants and no concept of money and his conviction that he leads a more nobler and less base life than everyone he comes into contact with. And I do think his character is believable, unlike G K Chesterton who says
"By the end of the tale he has brought Skimpole to doing acts of mere low villainy"
(The low villany being taking a bribe that led to the feverous Jo being ejected from the comfort of Bleak House) I don't think of this as some kind of traduction, I think Skimpole has always been shown as a "low villain". The first such thing we see him do is demand money from people who barely have any to spare, and then make them feel as though he has done them a favour for allowing them to experience the joys of generosity (I mean OK they could have refused to give over the money, but when the alternative is for Esther (sp?) and co. to see their benefactor's friend go to debtor's prison (or whatever hellhole he was off to) they aren't going to say no are they?). And Mrs. Jellyby the supporter of hopeless causes having given up her Africa pursuit at the end of the book is now into Women's Rights, which Dickens seems to ridicule, having had a proponent of women's rights in the book previously shown to be a boring and if I recall correctly unattractive woman. Well we kinda know what Dickens thinks makes a good woman and devotion, humbleness, selflessness and kindness are all part of that.
Ok enough now.
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