David Copperfield

I just finished David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I did not have the chance to do it before, I knew the general storyline but I must say that I did not expect that my reading would turn into a duel.

I read relatively fast. I took speed reading classes and I can go through a 200 pages book in an evening. Recently I’ve been reading in the train (I have to commute daily to Hamburg), so I’ve been reading anything that come within reach. I was looking forward to D.C. but it turned out to be a deception. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great work, the writing is rich and beautiful, Dickens manage to make paragraph long sentences that make sense, do not seem to long and are beautiful. But it was the story and the characters that were a problem. I did not like David or any of the other main characters (apart from David’s aunt that I found funny). I found that David was a pathetic dumb boy that probably deserved that things that were happening to him. I found that the story did not have any punch and lack imagination since all the same characters keep popping up in David’s life all the time and they do not seems to evolve committing the same mistakes and stupidity every time. It took me forever to read the book, my girlfriend keep saying: “You do not like that book, why do you continue to read it?”.

I do not have a good answer to that, it became personal. I was locked in a wrestling match with the book and I had to defeat him, and I did…

Anybody interested can find the book at the Guthenberg Project web site, since it’s now a public domain book. I do not recommend it, but maybe reading one chapter or two will allow you to appreciate the talent of Dickens, but the story is such a bore……