Day Two Hundred and Seventeen
Oliver Twist Page: 427 Finished
The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh Page: 113
I enjoyed Chesterton’s Preface to Oliver Twist (which was at the end of the book) almost more than the novel itself. It is melodramatic, saccharine, and trite. But Chesterton points out positively, as Orwell pointed out negatively, that Dickens is overwhelmingly moral. He jousts literarily with vice, injustice and all manner of evil wherever he finds it. He is not partisan and that is most refreshing to realize. Oliver Twist was actually Dickens’s second novel after Pickwick and I think it shows him underdeveloped as a writer. Anyway, read Chesterton at least.
Waugh has made so many appearances on Everyman’s Contemporary Classics list that I’m not sure how to deal with it. I’ve enjoyed every single book so far, although the quality is uneven, but surely one author doesn’t deserve five slots in a 100 greats list. Whether there deservedly or not, I’m liking Men at Arms.
We are almost done taking Veritas to bits and should be finished up tomorrow. We still have a ton of dishes to move, a bunch of books, a crapload of shelving, and all the computers. I need to make sure I get some info off of one of the computers before we shut it down, deal with my non-functioning cell phone, have the Veritas number forwarded to it…Ack! I’m officially overwhelmed. The POD gets delivered tomorrow. And I may have a buyer for my inventory…