books I've read

Anne Hawn's books

Who Moved My Cheese?
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
Scientific Secrets for Self-Control
Just One Damned Thing After Another
The Vanishing
Exercises in Knitting
The Good Dream
The Very Best of Edgar Allan Poe
The Chosen
BT-Kids' Knits
Talking God
The Professor
The Christmas Files
The Finisher
Home Decor for 18-Inch Dolls: Create 10 Room Settings with Furniture and 15 Outfits with Accessories
Dracula and Other Stories
A New Song
Christy
All Quiet on the Western Front
File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents


Anne Hawn Smith's favorite books »

I'm reading 150 Books

2019 Reading Challenge
2019 Reading Challenge 19614 members
<b>Are you ready to set your 2019 reading goal?</b> This is a supportive, fun group of people looking for people just like you. Track your annual reading goal here with us, and we have challenges, group reads, and other fun ways to help keep you on pace. There will never be a specific number of books to read here or pressure to read more than you can commit to. Your goal is five? Great! You think you want to read 200? Very cool! We won't kick you out for not participating regularly, but we'll love it if you do. Join us!

Books we've read

The Help
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
The Night Circus
The Golden Compass
11/22/63
The Little Lady Agency
Catch-22
The Good Father
A Discovery of Witches
The Knife of Never Letting Go
Fahrenheit 451
Frankenstein
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
A Christmas Carol
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
The Color Purple
Matched
Cloud Atlas
The Princess Bride
The Catcher in the Rye


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Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Great Expectations

Great Expectations (Oxford Bookworms)Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is at least my 4th reading of this book and each time I see new things in it. Young Pip is orphaned and living with his short-tempered sister and his friend and brother-in-law, Joe Gargery. There are two events in his childhood that shape the rest of his life. While he is out on the moors, he is accosted by an escaped prisoner and made to bring him some food under threat of death. He does this, but the consequences in his home are dire.

The next event comes about when he is summoned to meet Ms. Haversham and her ward, Estella in a setting so creepy that it would take the imagination of Dickens to come up with it. Pip is to come to tea and visit with Estella whenever he is summoned.

Years later, as a young man, he is summoned by a lawyer and told that he has "Great Expectations" and that he is to be sent to London and raised as a gentleman. It seems apparent to Pip that his benefactor must be Ms. Haversham and that he is destined to marry Estella. He feels that this must by why she had him come and visit when he was a child.

The rest of the story revolves around the education of Pip in not only schoolwork, but in life. He makes new friends and loses them and he leaves behind old friends and mourns their passing out of his life too late.

I love Dickens. There is no other author who has given the world such well known and instantly recognizible characters. His books are filled with characters so real that we feel that they must have existed in the flesh. How can Scrooge or Tiny Tim not have existed? There are people who feel that Dickens is too wordy, which may be true if your goal is to just get to the end, but Dickens is to be sipped and savored. His characters need to live in your imagination and act of their own accord. Taking up Great Expectations is like visiting an old friend.


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