The Rewards of Perseverance

I finished reading Bleak House this morning! I very rarely give up on reading a book once I've started and my experience with Bleak House confirms my feeling that it is not "a waste of time" to stubbornly finish a book "no matter what." I seriously started thinking about quitting when I was about a quarter to a third of the way into it but by the time I was halfway through it started to get interesting and I started to care about some of the characters. Others not so much.

I don't recall ever reading a novel with so many annoying characters, so many individuals to whom I wanted to give a severe tongue lashing. But the thing that made it hard to get into at first was that everyone used so many words to say the simplest little things. What you or I could say in one or two sentences took up one or two pages in this book. Everyone was so wordy. Generally, I like wordiness in novels; I like big books, I cannot lie (sorry, not sorry) but dialog is different. When someone has something to say I want them to just come out and say it plainly, without two or three pages of preamble.

I am glad I read it. Parts of it were sad and some of those parts made me feel like, "That's not fair! but that's like real life. A lot of it is not fair. And it wasn't all sad. For the most part it was a very good ending.