What I'm reading ...

I have started What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. After wading through a mire of 19th Century prose, I was in desperate need of something more modern. This book came recommended and seemed to fit the bill. Here's the blurb:

Imagine losing the most important ten years of your life ...

Alice is twenty-nine. She adores sleep, chocolate, and her ramshackle new house. She's newly engaged to the wonderful Nick and is pregnant with her first baby.

There's just one problem. All that was ten years ago ...

Alice has slipped in a step-aerobics class, hit her head and lost a decade. Now she's a grown-up, bossy mother of three in the middle of a nasty divorce and her beloved sister Elisabeth isn't speaking to her. This is her life but not as she knows it.

Clearly Alice has made some terrible mistakes. Just how much can happen in a decade?

Can she ever get back to the woman she used to be?

Martin Chuzzlewit - by Charles Dickens

Phew! That was a marathon read. I never thought that I would be finished! It is not just that it is a long book - the Victorian/Dickensian English does tend to drag. I came to the conclusion that, although Dickens does paint some very vivid word pictures, he was very much a "why use one word when 6 will do" kind of writer. Although the story has a lot of complex nuances, I cannot help feeling that it could have been told in well under half the number of pages. I do wonder whether Dickens' work should have been subject to severe editing when it was moved for serialization in newspapers to book form.

Overall, I did enjoy the story and was keen to know the outcome. At one point, I wondered whether, because there appeared to be [and actually are] two characters with the name Martin Chuzzlewit, the story was set across multiple timelines. It became clear that this was not the case. I guess that is a much more modern technique. As I said, the writing style is verbose, but there are times when this works well to convey Dickens' sense of humour. He is deeply sarcastic about some specific characters [like Mrs. Gamp] and about the United States, but executes that in a very humorous way.

I am glad that I read/finished the book, but was getting very weary towards the end. I do not think that I will be returning to Dickens. Although his stories are strong, his writing style has, IMHO, gone past its sell-by date.