Sunday, July 08, 2007

Book Review: "The Pickwick Papers"

It's one of my favorite Dickens works, but I've never managed to quite get all the way through The Pickwick Papers (or The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club) until this summer. I've been reading it slowly over the last couple months, just a chapter or two before bed most nights.

A series of loosely-connected vignettes centering around the adventures (misadventures is probably more apt) of Mr. Pickwick and his fellow Pickwick Clubbers Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle and Tupman (not to mention his able and unforgetable servant Sam Weller) as they travel the countryside making friends, getting into trouble and sowing chaos, good cheer or simple bemusement.

Occasionally good for a laugh-out-loud moment, and always an interesting satirical commentary on social clubs, journalism, politics and English society in general, Pickwick Papers is Dickens at his A-game.