The ghost of Red Dragons past

Now that I'm free of the Cantor I have moved on to fiction again. Two new-to-me writers, which is exciting, especially since one of them has already been a revelation, that one being Charles Dickens. Found a copy of A Christmas Carol for 50 cents in the junk shop, so despite it being approximately the opposite of Christmas I snapped it up and read it. I'd been hesitant to dip my toes into the Charles because of my awareness he was one of those 'paid by the word' writers, and I'd feared getting bogged down in the wordiness of it all, but I'd meant to start reading his work for some time after I'd got bogged down by Gaskell's wordy, wordy North and South that meandered and meandered and finally wrapped up lickety-split - and still enjoyed it a lot.

I'll now find and read one of his monster novels without further procrastination because A Christmas Carol was absolutely delightful. And the wordiness, the meandering passages, were much more charming, illustrative and illuminating than anything in North and South or, for that matter, Gone With the Wind - another lovable monster. Also, A Christmas Carol made me weep like a baby - well, rather more quietly. Wikipedia says that my number one lady Virginia Woolf found his novels overly sentimental, but much as I love the Woolf I'm not going to take advice on what sort of sentiments I should be consuming from a lady who lined her pockets with rocks and chucked herself in a river, no matter how well-written her suicide note was.

Also I think it's a nasty way to do yourself in because of the state of your body when they find it. Someone who I cared very much about - one of those fulcrum people whose influence changed the entire course of my life - decided for reasons I can respect, if not understand (thank God), that his own life was no longer worth continuing. So he went out onto a large lake on a canoe, and shot himself in the head. He'd left a note but it still took awhile to find his remains. That plays on me - that it had a hole in its head, and that it took so long to find it. I can't imagine how it plays on his family. It's a horrible, merciless, confining thing, in a way, but I think we have a duty to each other, to try not to do things to ourselves that will play on the people who love us. In that sense, no one is free and no one should be free.

Anyways. Also reading Ulysses. Only got through the first 50 pages or so of roughly one million, so far too early to make any judgements, except I have, of course: it's an incredibly boy book. As mentioned I like the occasional boy book, but can I handle roughly one million pages of boy? Time will tell. So far I'm enjoying it enough to keep going.