Bleak House is a long novel, approaching a thousand pages, and I have a correspondingly large set of things to say about it. I’ll begin by simply saying that I liked it.

From one angle, the book is primarily about Britain’s Court of Chancery. From what I gather, the Court of Chancery was the court that dealt primarily with wills and things of that nature. When I say “the court,” I mean the court. There was only one, presided over by the Lord Chancellor, and all business of this kind had to go through it. But not only was it a bottle-neck, it was dysfunctional. Once any case had been brought before it, as it might be a dispute about a will, the case could be carried on, slowly, painfully, and above all expensively until the estate in dispute had completely vanished into the pockets of an army of lawyers. Dickens regarded this as a great wickedness, and I daresay it was.

In the present volume, consequently, much of the action concerns a case called “Jarndyce and Jarndyce”, a case that has been ongoing for many years and shows no sign of coming to a conclusion. Most of the characters are tied to the case one way or another.

A secondary theme is an English penchant for do-goodery. The book contains portraits of a number of men and women with missions, missions that they pursue to the neglect of the duties directly before them. The most prominent of these is Mrs. Jellyby, who is consumed by a scheme to establish an English colony in the African village of Borrioboola-Gah. She spends her days in feverish correspondence on the subject, while completely neglecting the care and upbringing of her large family. Even from today’s point of view, when most women have entered the work-force and two-income families are common, Mrs. Jellyby’s detachment from the interests of her children is shocking. (I’ll note that there’s not much positive to say about Mr. Jellyby, either.)

At one point, we get to see a large collection of these fervent activists all in one place. One is a feminist of a type still all too familiar:

Miss Wisk’s mission, my guardian said, was to show the world that woman’s mission was man’s mission and that the only genuine mission of both man and woman was to be always moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at public meetings.

And then there was a clergy man, whose home was a wilderness

but whose church was like a fancy fair. A very contentious gentleman, who said it was his mission to be everybody’s brother but who appeared to be on terms of coolness with the whole of his large family…

There’s very little new under the sun.

The true backbone of the book, and the source of most of its charm, is the person of Miss Esther Summerson. The book consists of chapters of third-person-omniscient narrative, written from a variety of points of view, all in the present tense, and the first person narrative of Miss Summerson, whom we follow from her earliest days. She is the backbone, and the heart and soul of the book, and I quite fell in love her.

It is notoriously hard to write an interesting book about goodness, especially in our day when we have largely lost the pertinent vocabulary of virtue and vice. Things were different in Dicken’s day, and Esther Summerson is a thoroughly good woman: capable, smart, taking care for others, and blessed with a touching humility. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis describes the sort of woman who lives for others–and you can tell the others by their hunted looks. Mrs. Pardiggle, a friend of Mrs. Jellyby’s, is a pre-eminent example. Such people do little good and a great deal of harm. But Esther Summerson is the real deal, the true coin of which Mrs. Pardiggle is the counterfeit.

I have the suspicion that this book, and especially the passages involving Esther, are the sort of thing that some would dismiss as “sentimental”. I suspect rather than some people simply don’t recognize goodness when they see it–or don’t believe in it.

There is a host of secondary and tertiary characters, in all states of moral growth or decay, including those who have learned by hard experience and those who have not, those who have grown old in kindness and in depravity. I found it touching, repellent, heartwarming, and funny by turns.

One last note: I did not read the book straight through. I find I need to be in the right mood for this kind of thing, and so I’d usually read a few chapters and then switch to something else. This is another great feature of the Kindle: it’s possible to be reading several books at once, each for a particular purpose of mood, and turn from one to another at a moment’s notice without having to carry multiple volumes about.

I got my Kindle from Amazon about two weeks ago; and darn it, it works!. When I’m sitting in a comfy chair, I can lose myself in it just like I can in a printed book, something that seldom happens when I’m reading something on the laptop screen. And reading on the Kindle has some advantages over printed books. Being rigid, it’s easier to prop up on the kitchen table, and it doesn’t flop closed if I take my hand away. The search feature makes it easier to remember just who minor character Jones is, and why he’s important. And if I highlight an interesting quote, it’s much easier to find it for later use.

As witness, here are some of the books I’ve read on the Kindle since I got it.

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens: I’m not much of a Dickens fan, but over the last several months I’d run across a number of mentions of how delightful Bleak House is, a description I never would have guessed from the title. I downloaded it for free from FeedBooks.com, and gave it a spin. Dickens had me in the first paragraph:

Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

The book’s almost a thousand pages long, and I devoured it over the course of the following week. And, come to think of it, I’ve got too much to say about it for an omnibus review like this, so I’ll move along.

The Skylark of Space and Skylark 3, by E.E. “Doc” Smith: I downloaded these, both of which I’d read years ago, from FeedBooks.com and ManyBooks.net respectively. These two sites both draw from Project Gutenberg, and consequently have similar selections; however, the folks at FeedBooks appear to put more effort into producing an attractive product. On the other hand, I found Skylark 3 at the latter but not at the former.

Anyway, these books are classic tales of Space Opera and Super Science, and if I can’t take them at all seriously at least they are good fun. Or mostly good fun; it’s interesting to see how attitudes have changed since the 1920’s, when these were written. There’s a casual acceptance of both eugenics and genocide (fiendish alien race; universe not big enough for both of us) that would be unthinkable following WWII.

I also notice that all of Smith’s heroes in these books (and in his others that I’ve dipped into) are flawless physical and mental specimens. It’s not enough that Dick Seaton, super-scientist of the Skylark series, is a super-scientist; he also has to be one of the best tennis players and fastest shots in the country. Wishful thinking, anyone?

Update: These freely available e-books derive from the original magazine publications; they are not identical to the novels published with these titles. I glanced at a printed copy of Skylark of Valeron a couple of days ago; it’s the second of the novels, but its opening scene would be somewhere in the middle of the e-text of Skylark 3, if it were included at all, which it isn’t. It appears to me that the first three of the printed Skylark novels cover approximately the same ground as these two e-books, with lots of additional material.

Slan, by A.E. Van Vogt: I recently decided to give Van Vogt a try, having not read much of his work, and found this in Kindle Store. It’s an edition prepared by an outfit called Rosetta Books, which evidently specializes in producing and selling electronic editions of older books that are still in copyright. Peace be upon them, but I have to say that the frequency of typographical errors was unpleasantly high.

Be that as it may, Slan is the story of a young lad, Jommy Cross, who isn’t fully human. Rather, he’s a “slan,” a member of a new race, descended from humans, but with greatly enhanced faculties. Slan can read minds, are stronger than humans, and much smarter. They are also forced to live in hiding, because the vast mass of humanity hates them.

The book is interesting from a historical point of view, especially after reading the first couple of Skylark books: Dick Seaton is (minus the mind-reading capability) more or less a slan. The action kept me reading, and some bits are really good. But Van Vogt’s dialog is just awful, and the book ends with a most implausible info-dump. In short, I didn’t buy it.

But on the other hand, it was entertaining enough, and it cost me less than a printed copy would have. So what’s to complain about?

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman: Here’s a delightfully odd outing by Gaiman, intended for middle readers, about a boy who grows up in a graveyard, raised by ghosts and other denizens of the night. The boy’s family is murdered in the opening chapter, to some fell purpose, but the boy escapes and is taken in by a kindly shade. Ultimately, of course, the boy learns why his family was killed, and rejoins the living world.

The immediate inspiration for the book was, oddly enough, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, hence the title.

The book is illustrated, and the illustrations were included in the Kindle edition, but as it’s only four-level grayscale they weren’t all that clear and I didn’t spend much time looking at them.

This is probably the time to mention a minor detail about the Kindle that I find absolutely charming. The Kindle has a sleep mode that you use when you’re not actually reading; it saves power, and also ensures that pages don’t get turned accidently when you’re carrying the Kindle about in backpack or purse. And when the Kindle is sleeping, it pops up an image on the display, one of a large set of classic engravings, wood-cuts, and so forth that were chosen to take best advantage of the Kindle’s four-level grayscale display. The images are cool, and my only wish is that there were more of them.

Once upon a time there was a TV called Firefly, which was cancelled toward the end of the first season. And lo! It had many, many fans, some of whom are known to read this weblog. And in the days that followed the cancellation, it was proposed that a series of novels should be written, carrying the story forward. And lo! An author was chosen, and the first novel was begun.

But it was not to be. The money failed, and the series of novels was abandoned. But the author, whose name was (and is) Steven Brust, completed the first novel anyway, and released it into the Creative Commons. And lo! It is called My Own Kind of Freedom, and it is available at FeedBooks.com. And there was great rejoicing.

* * * * *

For those who’ve seen the series: the book takes place some time after Shepherd Book leaves the Serenity but before the events of the movie with the same name. And Brust got the tone exactly right; the novel reads like an extended episode of the TV show. If you’re a fan, you should look it up.

I wanted to like this book, but I didn’t. I intended to finish, but got stranded about three-quarters of the way through, and haven’t managed to pick it up again.

I don’t mean to say that it’s a bad book; I’m not at all sure that it is. (I’ll come back to that.) But it doesn’t work for me. I am not in its target audience. (I’ll come back to that, too.)

I picked up the book because of its author and because of its topic.

Kathleen Norris is an oddity, a Presbyterian who is an Oblate of St. Benedictine, that is to say, a Lay Benedictine as I hope one day to be a Lay Dominican. She’s written about this in an earlier book, The Cloister Walk, which I’ve run into frequent mentions of and which I glanced at last year when I was reading about St. Benedict and his order. It’s one of those books that’s been on my list to think about buying someday, maybe.

Then I ran into this book at the bookstore, and the topic grabbed me: “acedia”. This word, seldom encountered these days, is usually translated “sloth”–another word that is seldom encountered these days. I gather that practically speaking there’s a distinction between the two words that is frequently lost. In any event, it’s a word I’d encountered a number of times in the past year, most recently in Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and I was curious to find out more about it.

Norris’ book begins with the following vivid passage from Evagrius, one of the ancient monks of the desert:

The demon of acedia–also called the noonday demon–is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour (or lunchtime), to look this way and now that to see if perhaps [one of the brethren appears from his cell].

The passage continues with details that are less applicable to those who aren’t monks…but replace the words “cell” and “brethren” in the above with “office” and “co-worker” and suddenly it strikes uncomfortably close to home.

So I was interested in what Norris has to say. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out so well in practice.

First, much of the book is autobiographical. The autobiographical material is intended to illustrate the points she’s making, but for me its volume tends to obscure them. Perhaps if I had read Norris’ previous books, and been more interested in her as a person, I’d have this material more interesting.

Second, Norris is a poet. To my shame, I have very little taste or patience for serious poetry; when I see verse I usually skim over it (unless I think it’s likely to be funny). And then, as Norris herself says, she’s not about making distinctions–and I’ve been spending the last year reading philosophy. I think one might fairly say that it is the philosopher’s job to make fine distinctions between things that are similar and the poet’s job to draw similarities between things that are completely distinct. I tend not to trust poets, perhaps for this reason, and in any event it means that Norris’ method is muddying the waters for me rather than clarifying things.

Finally, as I indicated above, I don’t think I’m in Norris’ target audience. She seems to be writing for people who are familiar with the language of psychology and psychotherapy, and who tend to think of life in those terms. She spends a great deal of time drawing a line (ironically, making a distinction) between the psychological condition of depression and the moral condition of acedia, trying to make it clear that these are two different things, and that the moral and spiritual order does not reduce to the psychological order. She’s right, of course. They are not equivalent; growing in holiness, and in the knowledge and love of God, is distinct from growing in mental health.

The difficult here, for me, is that I don’t tend to see things in psychological terms. I also don’t tend to presume that personal problems are largely of psychological origin and can be combatted through therapy, which appears to me to be the position that Norris is arguing against. I think that most people are more or less normal, and that psychotherapy is more or less irrelevant to most of them. (Please note, I’m not discounting mental illness, here; I just don’t think it’s a good way of viewing the world.)

So as I say, this book wasn’t written for me, and it doesn’t work for me, and that’s a pity, because so far as I can understand what Norris is getting at she seems to be on the right track. Oh, well.