Readers Message Board Palaver

<< "Kind of marvelllous that the world's first novel can be on your just list. Strictly personal, I'd substitute Great Expectations for your pick, but I don't quarrel with yours, not one bit." >        - BB3 < "I absolutely, positively HATED Great Expectations.  Pip had to be the most whiny character I have ever encountered.  Two of my three kids have also read it and feel the same way.  I loved David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, etc.  But I would leave Great Expectations OFF any *must read* list of mine.  I would also scratch Lord Jim off any list.  IMO, it was slim pickings the year the powers that be added Lord Jim to a classics list.  I did like Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness though." > From: MarySkl   A classmate, David Kenneth Israel, apparently talked our Literature professor - whose name escapes me this second - into allowing me, an undergraduate, to take a graduate course, a single author course, actually called a 'Graduate Seminar' in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard in the 1950s. I think I got a B-. Hey, I passed!  Here's the poop. Dickens' reputation was given a boost by the publication of a new biography by one, Johnson, not long before I took that inspiring course. Great Expectations can be read as a rewrite of David Copperfield written 35 years later. David had to learn caution and discretion, while the trajectory of Pip's life taught him to stop being such a snob. You're absolutely right/correct/on-target David is infinitely more likeable than Pip. One might say that the later novel was almost a confession by the narrator. I believe it is now generally believed that the later novel is the stronger work of art written by a very great artist at the peak of his powers. Barry