We’d like to say a big thank you to all the reading groups who have been our Dickens Champions this year – for all your reading, enthusiasm, inspiration and endurance.
There have been garden and birthday parties, Dickens’ walks, trips to the theatre and visits to museums, Olympic swimming, a Dickens Reading Group Day and, of course, lots of reading, debating and reviewing. We’ve enjoyed it, we hope you have too.
Hollingbourne Reading Group and Belper Book Chat give us their thoughts on being part of the project as they met for the last time to talk about Dickens.
Hollingbourne Reading Group: Mufflers & Mince Pies
We have now completed our set of books, ending with Dombey and Son_. We celebrated with a Christmas Party called "_Mufflers & Mince Pies" (pictured). We all arrived in long mufflers resembling Dickens’ time and gathered round the wood fire for mulled wine. We discussed again our set of books – Bleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities and Dombey and Son. We enjoyed reading them all but our favourite was Bleak House. Thank you for organising the project.
Belper Book Chat: a fond farewell
The Belper Book Chat group gathered together for their last meeting as the 2012 Dickens Champions to mull over their final title: A Tale of Two Cities. It turned out to be a Reading Group of Two Points of View.
A group of two opinions
The “Oh yes!” group
The rich redness of it (wine/blood/knitting/caps) – the strong story line that brought several to tears by the end – the bringing to life of these legendary historic occasions… we can go on and on, several of us just lapped it up.
The “Oh no!” group
This group exhibited symptoms of reading fatigue including loosing their reading stamina and appetite; feeling confused; needing displacement activities (such as decorating); avoidance tactics (lost reading glasses) or general procrastination. The cure for this obviously viral condition is to leave Dickens for now and TRY AGAIN.
Thoughts about being Dickens Champions for a year
* A more varied selection of Dickens would have been better; our books were the two historical ones (Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge) plus a blur of orphans, prisons, old men and weak young women. But before we started we didn’t know what to choose.
* Methods of reading varied and have had an impact on our enjoyment. Audio brought some of the books vividly to life for some of us and we have watched relevant films and TV too to help our understanding.
* Reading five Dickens is probably just too many pages in one year, as well as everything else we’ve been reading. Even the more enthusiastic amongst us have become weary.
* Reading Guides or suggested ideas for discussion may have helped us to structure our meetings most productively.
* The reading in installments experiment, to try to recreate the original publication in serial form, didn’t really work for us but was interesting to try.
The Best of Dickens – the satire, characters, social commentary
The Worst of Dickens – very wordy, formulaic, just too long.
Being part of Dickens Champions has been an interesting special focus for our reading this year – but we’re quite glad it’s over!
Have a look at the Belper Book chat Dickens Wordle.
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Get involved
Read Hollingbourne Reading Group’s blog post on Little Dorrit.
Read Belper Book Chat’s blog posts on David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and The Old Curiosity Shop
Read our Dickens Champions’ blog posts as they read and reviewed their way through Dickens in 2012.
