(no subject)

I can't really stand *reading* anything by Dickens, but Librivox has made listening to Dickens a worthwhile proposition. First off, it's free. Secondly, I can do it while knitting and spinning and so forth. Thirdly, The Pickwick Papers is more fun than it ought to be... and Dickens is so mean that he's actually funny. Yeah, he is wordy, but that means I don't have to listen, fixated, on every single word. If he's going on about the august Pickwick, the gallant and true and noble and blah-blah-blah, I can paw through the wool bag to find new pretty locks to card without worrying that I'll miss a salient plot point. The plot points, it must be said, are pretty big and well-illuminated with no danger of missing them. So, if, heretofore you have not enjoyed Dickens due to the heavy lifting involved in reading him for your own damn self (even on onionskin, those are thick books), give Librivox a whirl and see if you like him better for listening-to than reading. Note that in the era Dickens wrote, lots of families did "one reads and everyone else listens and does handwork" evenings. (There was no television, no internet, and I don't think there was radio, either.) Maybe there is something to it, that his stuff is just more fun heard than read.