Nicholas...Nickleby?

Here's that big, meaty, and juicy post I promised you. I think it's long overdue.

So, just by way of introduction to this soon-to-be-hefty post, three weeks ago my family took a small camping trip up in the White Mountains for a few days. It was just a time to relax and lie around, so we didn't do very much, but one thing we did do was check out this "Antique Book Store" that was right next to the campground. Book shopping and video game shopping are the only two times you will ever see me actually enjoying shopping, and this book shopping was no exception. I think I could have spent hours in that shop, just looking at the beautiful old books lined up on the shelf. I actually did spend hours in the shop, and got a book I've been looking for for a while (an old hardbound copy of all the Leatherstocking Tales, though that's a post for another day). So, since pretty much all of my family enjoyed the book shopping, we checked out another little book store nearby, where I got a two-volume copy of Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby (I picked the book because I like Dickens' work and I figured a book with my name on the cover couldn't be too bad :D).

Ok, now to the meaty goodness of the post.

I should hope you've at least heard of Charles Dickens, though you should've read one of his books as well. So, under the assumption that you have not lacked a decent education in literature, I will merely say that he wrote classics that were both very popular when he wrote them and still are decently popular, considering their age. Why were his books so popular?

Well, to really understand that, you'd need to read his writing. Just make sure it's unabridged.

Dickens always writes with a certain sympathy for the common, downtrodden person, and usually always assumes such a person's viewpoint for his story. So, since most of us are common people, we can all sympathize with the character and go through their struggles as if they were our own.

But, for me at least, the best part of Dickens' writing isn't what he writes, it's how he writes.

When Dickens describes a character, he doesn't make the mistake of most other authors by giving a long, painstaking description of how they look, of what they like to do, of the way they think, and so forth. He does give some description, of course, but as to the person's character, he generally gives you a little hint as to what they're like, and then lets the way they behave in the story show you exactly what they're like.

And when it comes to the main character, he lets you know exactly what he's like to the point where it seems like you no longer are entering the main character's head, he's entering yours. Sounds strange when put like that, but really what I mean is you so fully sympathize and empathize with the character, that when you begin to react in the same way as the character to different situations that arise, you wonder whether it's because you always would have reacted like that, or because you're so fully bonded with the character that you feel his triumphs and despairs as keenly as if they were your own.

Dickens also tends to over-emphasize his characters' traits, stressing one aspect of their personality as much as possible. It would seem at first that this would be annoying, but in reality, it's so like real life, with each person having some unusual aspect to them, that the characters become very believeable and real. And it also adds a little humor to what would otherwise be a very dry character.

Speaking of humor, I think I found the genius version of my own.

Although I hate putting myself in any way, shape, or form on the same plane as a literary genius like Dickens, I have to say, at times his humor reminded me of something I'd add into a more humorous post. He injects a subtle sarcasm, a manner of stating something with perfect seriousness that you know isn't serious by the sheer ridiculousness of it, a way of indirectly stating word-for-word what the person said without actually quoting them, a tendency to have certain characters make fun of themselves or people outside the book in a subtle yet obvious way (by the way, the only one of those aspects listed above that I claim any tie to is the slight sarcasm). Dickens also likes to make up his own words to explain something in that one word that would either have taken much longer to explain or would never have added the same mildly sarcastic humor to the statment (a couple of my favorites are "...after much speechifying..." and "...how the accused man evilly, cruelly, dastardly, and otherwise evil-adverbiously deceive such-and-such a person...") I mean, how often are you going to read a 19th-century author using words that you'd usually make up when joking around with friends?

Good stuff.

So yeah, I finished that 999-page, two-volume hardbound copy of Nicholas Nickleby a couple weeks ago. Very good reading, although if you're reading Dickens for the first time I'd suggest A Tale of Two Cities first. It's shorter, more action-packed and just as excellently written (that book is actually how I found out I liked Dickens' work so much).

Thus, if you find yourself wondering what kind of book to read next, take my suggestion, grab one of Charles Dickens' books, it'll be worth it.