Classic Reads: Great Expectations May Be Unlikeable to Some, But It's My Favorite Dickens Novel

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was one of the first great classic novels I remember reading.

While the book does have its problems ...

Facebook friend Rebecca Brown notes: "I disliked all the characters, so I didn't really care what happened to them. I can't remember why I even finished it, honestly."

I think the combination of mystery and moral values within the story contributed to turning me onto a life of being interested in literature. Also helping in this regard, I think the characters are great (even if mostly unlikeable). Pip, in particular, is memorable in building our compassion for him before he destroys that trust with his obsession of climbing the social ladder, which Dickens clearly finds to be a distasteful way to live one's life.

Seven-year-old Pip is brought up in his sister's home after his parents and five brothers have died. He gets hired by Miss Havisham to be a play partner for her adopted daughter Estella. Pip loves Estella from the beginning but finds Miss Havisham very eccentric. She had all of her clocks stopped, for one example.

Facebook friend Lynn Davis adds" "Miss Havisham is a hoot. I think of her when I see a lot of cobwebs (not in my house, of course :o). She fascinates me too."

Estella goes off to school and Pip's sister gets badly assaulted by a convict Pip has coincidentally once helped. Her new caretaker Biddy falls in love with Pip. These events cause him to increasingly become disenchanted with his status in life.

Four years later, a lawyer named Mr. Jaggers comes and buys Pip from his sister's house, noting that a secret benefactor claims he is a boy of "great expectations." He is taken to London to try to learn gentlemanly ways. His sister, his poor sister, is murdered and then, at age 21, Pip inherits a large amount of money. He is soon visited by a weather-beaten stranger and is horrified to learn that his longtime benefactor was not Miss Havisham but instead has all along been a convict named Abel Magwitch, whom he had encountered in the story as a child. Coincidentally again, his co-criminal had jolted Miss Havisham years earlier.

A series of characters and soap operas ensue, resulting in the death of many characters and the eventual maturity of Pip.

I would say that if there is one Dickens book to read, even more than A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations is the one to pick.

Classic Reads: A Tale of Two Cities Thrusts Us Into the French Revolution

Despite the complicated and sad plot, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, is well worth reading, especially for those not that familiar with the great story of the French Revolution.

With starving peasants being completed ignored by the aristocracy, the French Revolution explodes. A woman named Madame Defarge, the wife of Dr. Manette's former servant, leads the revolutionaries storming the Bastille.

Charles Dickens

Taking place in late 1700s Paris and London, King George III is preoccupied with England's colonies in America and Louis XVI is basking in his own luxury. A man named Jarvis Lorry is traveling from London to Paris on business when he encounters the ghostly apparition of Dr. Manette, a physician who has been wrongly imprisoned for 18 years and was an acquaintance of Lorry.

Lorry is traveling with the son-in-law of Dr. Manette, a man named Charles Darnay, who is thrown in prison along with many other aristocrats. Manette is convinced he can rescue Darnay out of the prison where he was holed up for all those years. But Defarge is particularly focused on keeping Darnay imprisoned.

The intertwined plot and slightly confusing characters within one of Dickens' top books make for a bit of a tough read, but the historical nature of the fiction gives the reader an unbelievable feeling of what life must have been like in those terrible and world-shaping years across the Atlantic Ocean from us.