Bookish Thoughts

I read this book more out of a feeling of "I should read this" than an actual desire to. Though my reasons were slightly more involved than it just being a classic. I want to read the second book in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, and I wanted to have a working knowledge of Miss Havisham before I did that. That said, I ended up enjoying this book more than I expected to. It still took me a long time to read (nearly two months), and I struggled with parts of it. I understood just enough to know how much I was missing. There's a fantastic chapter where Pip sees a production of Hamlet , and it had me laughing a lot. But I studied Hamlet pretty thoroughly in high school, so I understood all the jokes. Most of the other jokes in this book went right over my head. Pip's story was interesting, though, as infuriating as Pip himself could be. The twists and turns at the end and the way everything came together was exciting and satisfying. I'm glad I read it...

The people over at Serial Box are on a mission to bring back serialized fiction. They talk about combining the best aspects of novels and television shows, but this isn't really a new idea. It's just been dressed up a bit for the internet. Stories are broken down into "seasons" and "episodes". Theoretically, each episode should be a self-contained story that takes about 45 minutes to read (just like a TV show!), and the episodes build into an arc that forms a season. (And eventually extends into multiple seasons. Just like TV! Except you're reading, not watching.) The biggest problem with this format is that you can cram a lot more information into a 45-minute television show than you can into an equivalent-length short story. So a lot of the early episodes are made up of broad strokes. It takes a while, longer than normal, to start caring about the characters and what they're doing. But I did eventually start caring. I read the entire first sea...