Sunday, September 21, 2014

Bleak HouseBleak House by Charles Dickens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I listened to this on free classic literature audiobook podcast It was extremely good, and I had been so reluctant to read or listen to this book for years.  The title is so depressing, and also the PBS Series years ago starring Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock, where she is all in black, just gave me the creeps.  I love Diana Rigg, but something about the combination of Victorian law courts and people being cheated out of their inheritances just sounded so horrible, I didn't want to go there.

But there is so much more to this book.  It is not all doom and gloom.  It is a complex novel, rich with story lines and amusing, lovable and horrible characters.  As always, Heather Ordover (the podcaster) does a great job of giving an intro to each chapter, and the narrator is almost unbelievably good in the multiple voices she had to perform for this novel.  I highly recommend listening to it on Craftlit.  Even if you don't do any crafts, you can skip that part because she gives a "book talk starts at" time so you can fast forward over the craft segment.  This book was part of the "premium content" of the podcast, not the free content, but you can also buy it separately at the Crafting-a-Life shop.


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1 comment:

Erica said...

I don't think Dickens could have written a wholly depressing book if he'd tried. The man had a lot of humor in him, and his characters are great caricatures.

I was also just reading someone (can't remember who) who suggested that when people struggle with Dickens it's because they try to read a book all at once, when he wrote them to be serial novels, published one chapter at a time. Podcasts would be a great (modern) vehicle to use for an old classic.