Yesterday I finished a three week experience listening to the unabridged audiobook of Charles Dicken’s GREAT EXPECTATIONS in my car. You’d think being an English major I would have read this in Great Books or something, but I either slept in that day or kept my eyes down during the lecture so I wouldn’t be called on, so up to this point I had never in my life read any Dickens.  Oh sure, I’d read and heard about Dickens – long stories, memorable characters, plot twists, sentimental, etc., I’d read books by authors who are considered Dickensian (John Irving comes to mind), seen TV shows like LOST where a character’s favorite writer was Dickens, but the actual books I kind of avoided, binning them to an “eat your vegetables” group of Great Books authors like Proust, Joyce, James, etc.

Well my friends, I am here to tell you that this was one excellent book!  It was totally readable, totally accessible, totally interesting and so engrossing I sometimes wished for traffic jams so I could listen some more.  Besides being a great story (about Pipp, a country boy who “comes into property” from a mysterious benefactor), it was so full of life and humor and sadness and the whole gamut of human experience, one hardly knows how to begin to talk about it!  Suffice to say it’s now on my list of one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I am looking forward to reading my next Dickens novel quite soon, preferably less than 20 years after school.   So please, don’t be like I was, don’t put off an awesome reading experience because it reminds you of boring High school English classes with someone blowing spitballs at your back.  Read this book today!