A Dickens of a read.

It just remains to put all unfinished books onto a reading hold over Christmas and become a one-book wonder this week because Bleak House is proving to be positively all-consuming.I've opted for the Everyman's Library edition with the lovely smooth paper, the lush burgundy cover and the ribbon bookmark.
You know how easily impressed I am by a ribbon in a book.
Then that beautiful little inspirational quote ' Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side.' I have a growing collection of Everyman's Library, I'm starting to gather my most favourite reads in this very special edition.My introduction to Trollope's Pallisers came via Can You Forgive Her as an Everyman and I have slowly built up a little shelf full of favourites, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and plenty more Trollope's
I was a bit worried that I might have peaked too early with my recent nineteenth century obsession and end up in my usual Dickens of a quandary and give up. But it's obvious, my sojourn in the nineteenth century has prepared me well because I blend effortlessly in my bombazine gown and I've added in the new bonnet and cloak because it's freezing and as for the mud, well just gallons of it.I feel quite at home.
The BBC TV adaptation of a while ago is sufficiently distant to have had Bookhound and I spending a very long ten minutes trying to remember the name of the person who played Krook.You know the one I mean I was saying frantically, that comedian, big fat drunken slob of a chap sitting in the junk shop.Spontaneously combusted in the end...JONNY VEGAS!
Jarndyce v Jarndyce with some Jellyby, Dedlock, Guppy, Turveydrop, Tulkinghorn and the Smallweeds thrown in is proving irresistible and I don't want to declare too soon but perhaps this is it?
Just possibly I've found the Dickens that finally matches up to that fantastic Dickens of a reading experience of years ago and to date never outdone.Our Mutual Friend when I was eighteen and to this day I can remember the Veneerings, the Boffins, Bradley Headstone, Lizzie Hexam and Eugene Wrayburn as if I had read it last week.
If that's the case it's been a very long time coming, why didn't you all tell me Bleak House was so good :-)