Great Expectations
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman; a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.
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- Fiction:
1) The Sherlock Holmes Canon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes
My first exposure was through "The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes" and it made such a huge impression on me with its focus on the use of step-by-step logical reasoning to solving problems that in a sense it taught me to "think rationally" in real life. I then set about acquiring the complete canon and have read them all so many times that i can quote entire dialogues/passages from memory. The language used is also elegant and beautiful with lots of memorable phrases/quotes/quips etc. Every kid should be asked to read the complete canon and then discuss takeaways from them.
2) Charles Dickens - Started with Oliver Twist, Great Expectations
These books (read the unabridged versions) were my introduction to the "Human Condition/Human Values" faced by people from different economic strata. His books span different genres but always end with a positive note. The writing style is beautiful with a healthy dose of Melodrama, Humour, Vivid descriptions etc. which draw you in and keep you engaged. Here is a good essay on his narrative technique - https://www.lsj.org/literature/essays/dickens
Non-Fiction:
1) Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman - You can get scans of all his and other Soviet authors books at - https://mirtitles.org/
In those days (80s in India) American/British books were generally not available and too costly but Soviet books were easily available and very affordable. My dad bought me this 2-vol set and that motivated my lifelong interest in Science. An example: I was enamoured of the protagonist in "The Invisible Man" by H.G.Wells but Perelman uses it as a scientific case study and shows that instead of being a most powerful man (because he is invisible) he would be the most powerless/pathetic man. Read the book to find out why :-) It also kick-started my collection of Soviet Science books eg. "Science For Everyone" and "Little Mathematics Library" series. Teachers/Students should take a look at these books and use them productively in the classroom/self-study. They are concise, precise with no fluff and a high s/n ratio.
- The War of The Worlds, H.G. Wells, 1898
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 1861
Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"), A. Einstein, 1905
- We had Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in school. I was mesmerised by the incredible storyline and the shocking twist at the end. It introduced me to western classic literature for the first time and I was really impressed.
Then in college, there was an ongoing bet that who could finish the entire unabridged version of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It tool me three months to read the whole of it. It changed me as a person and made me aware of the fact that the problems faced by humans haven't really changed over the centuries, but only their manifestation has changed as per the present times.
And what about The Count of Monte Cristo and other books by Alexander Dumas.
The list goes on ...
- Great Expectations (Charles Dickens). It grows on you after you've read through the first part.
- You have to read it in context. It was written around the time of World War 1, when movies were still in their infancy and radio was limited to maritime and military use. Evocative descriptive language was the norm, because people were not used to thinking visually and needed all that verbal detail to fill the imagination.
I went through much the same experience as the author, but I still think Tolkien was OK, even though I no longer enjoy reading him so much. Sure, he's turgid in places (the second chapter of the first volume of LOTR is easily the worst part of the whole book), but then so's a lot of Charles Dickens' work. I love Great expectations but still wince at the hackery of Hard Times...there's a reason nobody even tried to make a movie out of that one.
- In 2020 I posted this, "Show HN: Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307752
It got front page for a few hours. I posted in the anniversary of when The Count of Monte Cristo first started to be published in serialized form. To celebrate it, I created a website called "Serial Literature" that allowed you to subscribe and read the book in a similar way, serialized, but in your email. I also added another famous work that was initially published serialized, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I later added about other 100 books to be read the same way (not all of them originally serialized).
I never posted about it anywhere else (maybe flopped on Reddit, I don't remember), but it got a lot of engaged subscribers. It never grew over that initial HN burst (I never advertised it again), but it got about 1,000 subscribers and, years later, a few dozens of those were still reading some book through Serial Literature.
That was until... a startup failed and my web app wouldn't work anymore.
At the time, I wanted to build something serverless and learn some new tech. I chose FaunaDB, learned their proprietary query language (FQL), actually enjoyed it a lot, and built the site with it. It was pretty neat and worked fine. But then, 5 years later, around June last year, their service stopped working (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414742). As it was serverless, the DB was also on their cloud, hosted by the failed startup, in a proprietary format. One day, Serial Literature stopped working overnight. I downloaded the data, but in their weird format, it was not very helpful.
I got a bunch of emails in the last months asking about it, people wanting to continue reading more through their email, where I explained what happened and promised it would come back in some form. This site I am showing now, Confabulists, is the come back.
I am a writer myself, indie, self-published, science fiction writer, and I missed a newsletter/blog platform more adequate for fiction writers, so I built one myself. And, yesterday, I finally completed bringing all those public domain books in English to Confabulists and now I am able to offer that same service of Serial Literature, again, still for free.
I hope this reaches everyone that loved Serial Literature, but just accepted it was gone and never contacted me (the ones who contacted me I am replying back telling them about Confabulists).
Thanks HN!
