Hey hey! I’m back from London — my flight got in around 9 last night and after getting home, letting everyone know I was back, and get my things in a little bit of an order, it was midnight before I went to bed.
But, thankfully I’m not feeling any jet lag, even though London is five hours ahead of Austin. I tried SO hard to stay awake during my nine-hour flight so that I’d get back on Texas time. Hopefully it worked!
I worked a normal day today, started my laundry, and cooked a few things to eat to hold me over until my Green Chef is delivered tomorrow. Adjusting back to life per usual is always interesting… but I’ll have a full recap of my trip right here next week!
Anyway, before I left for my trip, I finished reading “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens — Blanche’s Book Club was kind enough to choose a London-ish book just in time for my travels. Here is the book’s description:
This darkest and most colorfully grotesque of Charles Dickens’s novels swirls around one of his most beloved and unsullied heroes, the orphan Oliver Twist.
One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Dickens’s great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its re-creation—through the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikes—of the vast nineteenth-century London underworld of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children. Victorian critics took Dickens to task for rendering this world in such a compelling, believable way, but readers over the last century and a half have delivered an alternative judgment by making this story of the orphaned Oliver one of its author’s most loved works.
When I was putting together my list of books based in London, I realized there’s so many classic books I haven’t read. Yes, I read a few in high school and college, but i definitely haven’t made a dent in the list of classics, including anything by Charles Dickens.
Don’t turn me out of doors to wander in the streets again. Let me stay here, and be a servant. Don’t send me back to the wretched place I came from. Have mercy upon a poor boy, sir!
Reading anything in old English is difficult and this was not easy. I read parts of it out loud to try and comprehend more of it, but it always comes across to me as so much more complex than it needs to be.
Overall though, I could see why Dickens was (and is) such a popular author, because the story itself was interesting and for being published in 1839, it’s not a far-fetched tale.
I’d definitely recommend reading it if you’re looking to boost your list of classic reads.
While I was on the flight back, I had to read a business book as part of a project I’m working on with a client and I was thinking, why not add business books to Blanche’s Book Club?? So, I’m going to!
The next book we’ll be reading is “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries.
The regular blogging schedule is now BACK – looking forward to seeing you here 🙂
The Bitter Lemon 