By my count, it has been three days since last I posted.  It feels like longer.  I finished Anne of Avonlea, rushed through Anne of the Island, and decided to take a little hiatus from Lucy Maud for something I suspect Anne herself would approve of - David Copperfield (the Dickens, not the magician).

Why that particular tome, you ask?  I suppose Anne did play some part in the decision: in AotI, she reads The Pickwick Papers; there's something so right about chasing a book about a reader with a book that they were reading (and I don't own Pickwick, so it was this or Nicholas Nickleby or A Tale of Two Cities).  On top of which, I am watching Lost, a show that does not shy away from literary allusions, and Desmond David Hume is a great fan of Mr. Dickens (again, I didn't have immediate access to Our Mutual Friend).  Anyway, Dickens seemed the way to go.  

My past relationship with the oeuvre of Charles Dickens is limited to A Christmas Carol (which I have read probably once and seen in various iterations more times than I can remember) and Great Expectations.  The latter I read when I was in high school and had only recently begun to work through a list of recommended classics (a list of about 80 books that I did ultimately complete, sometime in college or shortly after).  I don't remember feeling strongly one way or the other about it, though I suspect my perspectives have changed somewhat, hopefully enough to make DC a thoroughly enjoyable experience (I experienced similar shifts in opinion about Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf).  It's a long book, so I expect to have plenty of time to reflect on how I feel about it, but I take heart in Anne's and Desmond's love for Dickens, as well as the knowledge that, of his many works, DC was the favorite of Dickens himself.