Yep, still trucking along with Chuck D. Currently on page 631 of 895. The theme of the past 100 pages or so has been Anti-Semitism. There is a Jewish man who is employed as a debt collector by one of the really bad characters. This bad guy figures out which of his friends are in debt, and then secretly buys the debt and sends Mr. Riah, the Jewish man, out to collect it, so that the friends don't know who is actually behind it. Awful, right? And to make it worse, the whole time, the bad guy just harangues Mr. Riah about how is he convinced that he has secret hoards of money hidden away somewhere and is sure that Mr. Riah steals from him, because of course that's what Jewish people do, and just mercilessly makes fun of Mr. Riah in front of people. And another character calls him Mr. Aaron because he thinks that's what all Jewish people are named. I'm really hoping that this is just a devise by Dickens to show how bad the bad guy really is. The actual portrayal of Mr. Riah is otherwise positive - he tutors two poor girls and helps one of them escape a dangerous situation - so I don't think that Dickens actually hated Jewish people. Maybe Wikipedia will tell me.
The other interesting theme that I've noticed since my last post is that Dickens sets up these great similarities and contrasts between the young female characters. In a lot of ways, they are foils for each other, but I think they have too much in common to really call them foils. Bella is spoiled and is desperate to marry money so that she can get away from her tiny house and horrible mother, but she is totally devoted to her father, who is basically a long-suffering, sweet, cherubic lump. Lizzie is industrious and self-sacrificing; she helps her brother run away so that he can go to school and takes care of their father even though he is mean and does not approve of education and is possibly a murderer; after her father dies, she moves in with and cares for this weird midget crippled child/woman, but then her world is basically turned upside down because two men are in love with her, and she has to run away (with the help of Mr. Riah) because she worries that the one man who she doesn't love will kill the other one who she actually does love. Oh Chuck, I am counting on you to have Bella and Mr. Rokesmith and Lizzie and Mr. Wrayburn together in the end...
In other news - Barnes & Noble is having a 3-for-2 sale on their Classics series, so I picked out three:
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (more Dickens!)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot also by Dostoevsky
After Our Mutual Friend, I'm definitely going back to shorter books for a while, but I am looking forward to getting my Russian lit on eventually, maybe if we have a big snow this winter or something, and of course, I can't ever get enough Dickens. (That's what she said?)
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