Happy 200th Charles Dickens!

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Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens' 200th birthday Google doodle. (via Google)

Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens.  To celebrate, I have decided to read Bleak House for the month of February.  I have the Oxford World’s Classics edition and it has a total of 914 pages.  Its massive and I hope I could finish it by the end of the month.  If I read 30 to 50 pages a day I might get it done. So, I’m really hoping.

I also read a few articles that were published for his 200h birthday.  I really liked this post published by Christian Science Monitor of favorite Charles Dickens quotes.  Here are some that I liked:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” (From A Tale of Two Cities)

I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.” (From Great Expectations)

Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!

An idea, like a ghost … must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

I also read this article on the result of a poll asking for favorite characters created by Charles Dickens.  Can you guys guess?

Another article that I read was from The Guardian where Claire Tomalin muses on how Dickens might have thought of this day and age.

There’s also this article from NPR on the characters created by Charles Dickens and some of the phrases he coined that have stuck until this day.

And lastly, this article by Ben Zimmer on Dickens’ contribution to the English language.

Literary Birthday Reading Project [January 25]

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Robert Burns, Virginia Woolf, W. Somerset Maugham

(This post is meant to go up on the 25th and this is actually the first time that I’ve tried this kind of thing so I’m hoping it works)

It was Edith Wharton‘s birthday yesterday and when I found out that it was a day apart from Virginia Woolf‘s, something clicked in my head and out came a personal project.  This personal project is to read anything by or about the author who is celebrating his or her birthday on the day.  Given that it only spans a day and I do have an eight-hour job, it would most likely turn out to be reading something about the author.  But I did tell myself that if the author celebrating a birthday has a short story or a collection of short stories, I would read one.

On with his project then.  January 25 is a day shared by Robert Burns, Virginia Woolf, and W. Somerset Maugham just to name a few.

Virginia Woolf is one who I have heard so much about yet have never read even one of her works.  Nicole Kidman even won an Oscar for portraying her in a movie I have never seen and whose book I have never read.  Sads.  Anyway, I browsed over at eBooks @ Adelaide and Project Gutenberg and between the two of them, there are a few eBooks that I can read.  I saw that she has a couple of short stories that I might read from Mondays or Tuesdays OR A Haunted House and Other Short Stories.  She also has a couple essays that might be interesting: The Common Reader: First Series, A Room of One’s Own, The Common Reader: Second Series, Three Guineas, and The Death of the Moth and Other Essays.

Robert Burns was a Scottish poet whose name I have been familiar with since high school.  His name is associated with Auld Lang Syne and I just cannot remember if we tackled any of his poems. I might read a poem of his for his birthday.  Anyway, there are a couple of articles up on Robert Burns and I’ll share some of them here:

• Invasion of the Bard: How the rest of the world was influenced by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns Dinner.  This one was really interesting to read about.
• Scots vote Tam o’ Shanter favourite Robert Burns poem
• Poor Robert Burns. He deserves better than this

Portrait of W. Somerset Maugham, by Carl Van Vechten. _Wikimedia Commons_.

I own a book written by W. Somerset Maugham and that is Of Human Bondage, which consequently I have not read which I got it at a second hand book shop.  As per my googling, the W in W. Somerset Maugham is William.  I have also encountered his name through quotes included in recent articles that I have read.  Some of those quotes include this one on writing: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”  I also liked his take on skipping/skimming from this article on The Guardian because according to Maugham, “a sensible person does not read a novel as a task. He reads it as a diversion.” I actually don’t know yet what I would do for W. Somerset Maugham.  Maybe I’ll settle for a biography on Wikipedia or I’ll try to find something.