30-Day Book Challenge: Day 20

Day 20: Book That You Pretended to Have Read

Confession time: I only got about halfway through this book before giving up on it.

    As something of a Charles Dickens fan, I felt obliged to read David Copperfield, which is apparently Dickens' favorite of all his works. I'm not completely sure about this, but I think David Copperfield is also the most autobiographical Dickens book.

    I gave this book more of a chance than it deserved. I read more than 400 pages of this 729-page epic. (At least, the copy I have, the Barnes & Noble Classics release, has that many.) But then I stopped.

    Why are you reading this? I told myself. You are not enjoying this stupid book at all. Stop reading it! Stop torturing yourself! So I did.

    If any of you reading this post like the book, I'm sorry, but I just felt nothing as I was attempting to read it.

    I don't necessarily think the title character is sympathetic, but I don't think he's unsympathetic either. I don't like that all the women (except Copperfield's stepfather's sister) are exactly the same, and I don't understand why Copperfield hates Uriah Heep so much.

    I think the clone-like personalities of the women bothered more than anything else. My copy of the book includes this quote from Radhika Jones: "Even Dickens's admirers admit that his female characters tend disturbingly toward either saccharine angels or poisonous shrews," and that is absolutely the case with David Copperfield. Only Copperfield's stepfather's sister is in the latter category. Every other woman I encountered fell into the former category, and it really pissed me off.

    All the women were these sweet, well-mannered, perfect little angels whom everybody loved and doted on. And I, the reader, was rolling my eyes throughout. Maybe this was appropriate for the time, but I think it isn't right at all to portray women as sweet, innocent, delicate little girls. It makes feminists everywhere beg for mercy.

    Beyond that, I felt that the book (or what I read of it) had no interesting plot developments. Everything about Copperfield's life was so mundane and flat that I lost interest almost instantly. I think the only reason I battled through so much of the book was because of a vain hope that something interesting would happen. Sadly, that never came to pass.

    I keep saying that I have read David Copperfield, but that is a lie. I read more than half the book, but I didn't finish it because I got absolutely nothing out of it. It was the dullest crap I've ever tried to read, and I am something of a Dickens fan.