The Perils of Pickwick

My list of books read for the last several years has averaged around 27 to 28 titles. In 2010, it totaled only seventeen (although I reached that number in only three and a half months), due largely to an event which threw off all activities in our household for 4 months (that series of "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" posts is still coming up!) but due also to the nature of the 18th book I started to read.

Ah, The Pickwick Papers. How could a book so thoroughly enjoyed by Laurie and the March girls be so off-putting to me? It's the story that made Charles Dickens an overnight success, hugely popular in its day, supposedly uproariously comedic -- and yet it leaves me cold. Even the most cliche-ridden, formulaic, tear-jerking Dickens gets to me, but this comedy just seems like a 19th-century "Dumb and Dumber." There is no depth to the characters; they are mere buffoons to be laughed at. Well, I'm only several chapters in, and I understand that Dickens adjusted as he went along. (It was written as a serial.) I'll have to hope that it gets better, as I still intend to finish it when I get the chance. It doesn't tempt me much, though, so it continues to sit on my reading shelf.

It's actually been since last April that I picked up a book to read, but I have no dearth of reading material. I fell behind on my magazines, as well, and have a slidey stack to work through. I finally got caught up on all my bi-weeklies and monthlies and am now starting on the bi-monthlies, beginning back with September/October issues. (I pile them by frequency of their publication, as the most frequent are both the most likely to get out-of-date and the quickest to get through. Magazines which publish 6 times a year or less are by definition less timely).

As far as Faith's reading, she will have finished The Mouse and the Motorcycle by the end of this week (which seems to be available at Amazon only in the boxed set or a Spanish translation). She reads a chapter a day on weekdays and is a big fan of Roald Dahl, who favors short chapters. (Those in Fantastic Mr. Fox are only a page or two long!) She is working her way through the Klickitat Street books by Beverly Cleary, but we haven't found any book that she's enjoyed as much as The Boxcar Children, which she tore through in a single day! Even the sequels to that book haven't spawned as much enthusiasm -- which is congruent with my own experience reading them as a child. The sequels, even those by Gertrude Chandler Warner and omitting the Sweet-Valley-High-ification of the series set in the present day, were written many years after the original and just don't recapture the lightning in the bottle that the first book achieved. She enjoyed Betsy-Tacy, which I despised as a child for the sheer nothing that happened in it, but she's not excited about attempting the next book in the series, Betsy-Tacy and Tib.