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@tbc
I finished Great Expectations a couple of weeks ago, which was absolutely brilliant. Dickens' characters are fantastic, it's strange that the ones that seem to stick in public consciousness are overwraught stereotypes like Fagin or Scrooge, when actually characters like Pip and Joe are complex, human and wonderfully thought out. Somehow I'd managed to avoid knowing anything at all about the plot, bar knowing from South Park it featured someone called Pip, and from Carol Ann Duffy's poem that there was a batty old woman in a wedding dress. Turns out there was a bit more to it than that.
I'm currently reading something very different, which coincidentally has quotations from G.E. at the beginning of each chapter. It's a more modern book by David Nicholls called One Day, with a pretty interesting concept, namely following two characters over a twenty year period, by zooming in on their life on the same day every year. I thought it would be a bit of a guilty pleasure TV kind of book but it's actually very well-written with a great mix of emotional family-relationship bits and a kind of hazy nostalgia for the early nineties (at the minute) that I only know from listening to Blur as a kid, and which didn't really mean much to me then. Not halfway in yet, but based on what I've read so far, I'd definitely recommend it.