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Title: Hard Times (Modern Library Classics) by Charles Dickens, Jane Jacobs ISBN: 067964217X Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 10 July, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.59
Rating: 4
Summary: Worth the time
Comment: I hated reading Dickens in high school, and I was never able to get past the first chapter of any of his books, including this one. Now that I'm in my mid-30's, I want to re-visit a lot of the works that I had no patience for as a teenager, so I read Hard Times. Although there are many flaws to this book, I felt proud to have finally cleared the Dickens hurdle. Dickens is excellent at creating sympathetic (and evil) characters, even though they may be slightly cliche or wooden. The fact is, Dickens is able to hook you in with his plots and create a profound concern on behalf of the reader that the good guy (or girl) wins and the bad guy suffers. A lot of the twists in this book were a little "too convenient" and implausible to make it a crowining work of literature, but nevertheless it has motivated me to move on to Dickens' larger, more daunting works. If you are having any trepidation about tackling Dickens, Hard Times is a good place to start.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not Dickens' best book
Comment: Hard Times feels like a book that Dickens did not polish nearly as much as the many classics associated with his name. It's the story of the unhappy lives of two children of a father who raised them to speak and appreciate only "facts." Imagination, fantasy, passion, and the like were all forbidden in their household.
Their lives are unhappy, as you'd expect. But they also lack much narrative interest. The usual twists and turns of fate that Dickens invests into his characters' lives are mostly absent. As a result the book drags on. Hard Times also lacks the humor found in other Dickens books, his pithy observations of different persona of his time. So, in reading the uninspiring narrative, you find yourself wishing for something, anything of the old Dickensian magic. Alas, it does not show up.
If you have other Dickens titles you're set on reading, read them first. You're likely to enjoy them more.
Rating: 3
Summary: Outside his range.
Comment: Dickens was a great rhetorician, but not a very deep social thinker. _Hard Times_ is the novel in which he tries to tell us that there are a Whole lot O' Things Wrong with Britain in the nineteenth century. You've got people living in wage slavery! You've got educators who can't raise their own children! You've got amoral, rakish aristocrats! You've got unprincipled politicians and businessmen! When Dickens is taking on each of these subjects individually in his other works, he's wonderful; when he sews up his complaints against them into one big bundle and convinces himself that it's a Social Theory, he's a tiresomely shrill satirist and all of his characters turn as flat as paper before one's very eyes.
This doesn't, of course, mean that the book isn't worth reading - after all, it's Dickens. There are some very sweet and descriptively rich passages about a traveling circus and although one finds it difficult to give a hoot about any of the characters aside from Mr. Gradgrind (who might have been developed much more richly if Dickens had cut down on the windy deploring a little and worked harder to make him seem like less of a cipher) the plot thunders along at the usual absorbingly breathless pace. But if you haven't read _David Copperfield_ or _A Tale of Two Cities_ yet, then for God's sake don't start out with this relatively second-rate effort.
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Title: Hard Times (Cliffs Notes) by Josephine J. Curton ISBN: 0822005786 Publisher: Cliffs Notes Pub. Date: May, 1991 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Little Dorrit (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Stephen Wall, Helen Small ISBN: 0140434925 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Patricia Ingham ISBN: 0140436146 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Our Mutual Friend (Penquin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Adrian Poole ISBN: 0140434976 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Diane Johnson ISBN: 0553212478 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1984 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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