After reading a majority of women authors last year, this year I’ve exclusively read books by men. Englishmen at that. I didn’t plan it this way, but after finishing up the last two books of the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the umpteenth time (by umpteenth, I mean third), I read A Clockwork Orange and then settled into some Dickens.

I had only read one of his books before, decades before, when I read A Tale of Two Cities in high school. This time I started with Oliver Twist, next Great Expectations, and just finished David Copperfield. That’s Copperfield with two p’s, not David Coperfield by Edmund Wells, and certainly not Rarnaby Rudge by Charles Dikkens, the well known Dutch author.

I enjoyed all three Dickens books with Copperfield my clear favorite, it’s jumped into my echelon of favorite novels. Based on the other Dickens books, before turning a page I knew it would be a story about a young boy born into a loving and caring middleclass family and whose mother most certainly would not die in childbirth. Copperfield is a weighty book, something I realized the moment I slid it into my laptop bag and slung it over my shoulders, and left me pining for a future of electronic books.

Nevertheless it’s a great book and I highly recommend it in either weighty or weightless form.