Bleak House
As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
38mentions
35people
2011–2026years
18% recommend82% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > But my admiration for Middlemarch and Bleak House goes beyond their portrayal of the psychological interiority of their characters. [...] Both novels succeed at something else: they invite us to think across multiple scales of experience—and to make causal and associative connections between those different layers.
To toss another into the ring, I can't think of any novel I've read that could rival The Brothers Karamazov in this regard. Possibly East of Eden, but as great as it is it plumbs nowhere near the moral and psychological depths of Dostoevsky.
- I'm a big fan of Bleak House. The opening chapter is one if my favorite bits of Dickens. But it is a silly selection to expect a random undergrad from a state school in middle America to be able to fully parse on command unless they have some familiarity with London / Dickens or are in the midst of studying it. It's a book that you have to want to read or it is going to be a slog (saying this as a state-educated American).
The intro chapter is written more like a Shakespearean speech to be read aloud than a narrative chapter. The rest of the book isn't nearly so flowery.
Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.
You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".
- A few of this year's highlights for me and my notes on the books, where available.
Fiction -
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/2ab29d16-0cb1-4ef8-8cde...
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/65214629-29ac-45a6-b474...
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/bd090cb4-bc9a-41cb-9833...
Nonfiction -
The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine (my luckiest find of the year)
Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/13ebec0d-0859-4858-864a...
Vienna by Richard Cockett - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/c0e1d1fb-dea7-456b-a95e...
The House That Madigan Built by Ray Long (an interesting history of a legendary figure in Illinois state politics)
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
- "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens, unless I can get Anthony Trollope's "Barsetshire Chronicles" accepted as a single book.
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- All of the above, Life and Fate is essential, but also add Middlemarch: George Eliot - grown up problems, don't lie, be careful around money Bleak House: Charles Dickens - avoid lawyers, don't let money get to you
More left field - Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend - consistency is over-rated; any Houllebecq - keep thinking; Quartered safe out here - George McDonald Fraser - generation close to ours, but war-time experience like soldiers for the last 2000 years.
