Chapter 11 of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Continuing my battle with iTunes to burn the audiobook Great Expectations into CDs (I will never by an audiobook from iTunes again, now it is definite) I finally managed to hear a bit of CD number 2. (CD 1 does not work...)

Hearing Chapter 10 and 11 made me remember the master writer Dickens was. It is just amazing, life rolling before your eyes, centuries running back, real people talking, you can even smell the houses, the fireplaces, you can hear the wooden floors and the rustling of dresses. Dickens wrote by the yard and that was how he made a living but I believe that not only he sold his work based on a word count, but he actually had a lot to say.

Unfortunately this book has been forced on teenagers: 9th, 10th and 11th graders. The results are very poor. Kids today are not ready for the subtle language and irony, for the moral lessons and for the fine social criticism of Dicken's books. They go from "Grand Theft Auto" 2/3 hour leisure time to half an hour of reading schoolwork. Kids find the book boring and they end up being forever spooked away from Dickens.

I collected these kids opinions from  the website online-literature.com:

had to read this book in year 10 and do some coursework on it and it is definitely the most boring book i have ever read in my whole life and i hope noone else has to go through reading it. I agree it is VERY boring

am having to read this book for school, and it has been the worst book i have ever read in my life. This book makes me never want to read another book by Charles Dickens ever again. I am only on chapter 25 and i want it to be over! If you don't have to read this book...by all means, DON'T!!!

I am finding myself getting incredibly bored reading this book, and I'm only on chapter seven. I know it is probably because i am a student that i do find it boring and therefore cannot respect the style of the writing. None the less i still am bored reading this novel and i wish i didn't have to read it for a project.

This was one of the worste books iv ever been forced to read in my life!!!! i didnt even finish readin it because it as so bad! it was to difficult to understand and to hard to get into. i really hated this book and i hated having to answer stupid questions that didnt make any sence on it!!

And this is just a sample! I realize long books such as this one are hard to read and Dickens writes miles and miles. But isn't almost all literature like this? Except of course the very recent books that fit the description "young readers" or "young adults". Everyone has access to books now, something unthinkable two centuries ago. But now that we have come this far, we don't want to read or worse we can't read. And I think this process of empoverishment is not going to stop. Kids are now quicker and smarter around gadgets but slow and uncomfortable around books.

Just to finish this posting with a little of what I wanted to talk about in the first place, here is an excerpt of Chapter 11, when Pip runs into a strange man as he walks in the almost dark. This little episode cannot be found in any of the chapter's summaries that I have read so far and yet it is so impressive and vivid. Here is the man's description:

He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an exceedingly large head and a corresponding large hand. He took my chin in his large hand and turned up my face to have a look at me by the light of the candle. He was prematurely bald on the top of his head, and had bushy black eyebrows that wouldn't lie down but stood up bristling. His eyes were set very deep in his head, and were disagreeably sharp and suspicious.

Photo of de Niro's Lustig.

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