David Copperfield

 

Finished on: 2/14/2026

 

Rating: I beg your unbelievable pardon, Mr. Dickens? (Or, I dunno, ⭐⭐ stars I guess.) 

 

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Okay, so, I guess I'll preface this with a couple of the novel's strengths: I liked the first two-thirds of this book, and found certain scenes and character arcs to be genuinely very moving. For example, Mr. Peggotty's unwavering love for his adopted niece, Emily, is a beautiful portrayal of familial bonds, and I'll commend Dickens on treating Emily's character arc with a level of compassion. It read to me like a call for readers to interrogate the internal prejudices instilled in them by their time and culture. Also, Aunt Betsey and Mr. Dick are perfect, no notes. And lastly, I'll say that Dickens occasionally delivers stunning lines, like when David refers to human lives/mortality as "motes upon the deep of Time.”

 

All that being said, as I made headway through this novel, I found myself progressively more and more impatient with Dickens' portrayal of Dora's character, and her death scene in chapter 53 made me almost certain I can never read this book again.

 

David Copperfield is a fictionalized autobiography of Dickens' life. Most of the characters were modeled on real people (e.g., look up Jane Seymour Hill, who was the model for Miss Mowcher), most of the events in the book correlate to events in Dickens' life, and David Copperfield's character himself is clearly a representation of Dickens. It seems reasonable, then, to believe that Dora is intended to represent Dickens' real wife, Catherine.

 

Before I get into the specifics on why Dora's characterization so bothers me—and why her death scene, in particular, is infuriating enough to sour the whole novel—let me quickly review a couple biographical facts:

 

• Dickens became unhappy in his marriage to Catherine, and while we don't know specifics, he indicated to friends that he didn't think Catherine had ever been his intellectual equal.
• By 1855 (five years after David Copperfield was published), Dickens actively pursued affairs with other women, and in 1857 formed a long-term extramarital affair. (Little nugget: Catherine found out about her husband's affair when he had a bracelet sent to his mistress, but it was accidentally misdelivered to the Dickens household. Can you even imagine?)
• In 1858, Dickens and Catherine were separated. Dickens retained custody of their children, and from the sounds of it, he did not encourage them to maintain contact with their mother.

 

So, given that Dickens grew to dislike his wife because he perceived her as intellectually inferior, and given how he would go on to treat her, I find it extremely grating that Dora's character is portrayed in the following ways:

 

• She is stupid, and regularly refers to herself as such.
• She is relentlessly infantilized in every possible way (she literally asks David to think of her as his "child-wife"), is constantly referred to as childish/childlike, and her behavior is consistent with the behavior of a five-year-old.
• She is incompetent at everything except looking pretty and being cheerful. Readers are shown far too many scenes of her being unable to perform basic life skills, like addition/subtraction, grocery shopping, basic house cleaning and organization, etc., and all the while the reader is encouraged to sympathize with David's character because of how selflessly and earnestly he loves his "little child-wife," despite all these manifest flaws. 

 

But most egregiously of all, during Dora's death scene in chapter 53, she explicitly says to her husband David: "If I had been more fit to be married, I might have made you more so, too. Besides, you are very clever, and I never was." Then, mere paragraphs later, Dora says it's "better" that she's dying, actually, because, "After more years [of marriage], you never could have loved your child-wife better than you do; and, after more years, she would have so tried and disappointed you, that you might not have been able to love her half so well! I know I was too young and foolish. It is much better as it is."

 

Yes, Dickens made the fictional counterpart of his wife explicitly say to his own fictional counterpart that their disappointing marriage was her fault because she was too stupid and frivolous, and that it's better that she dies young. (I beg your unbelievable pardon, Mr. Dickens?) Meanwhile, in the early stages of their courtship/marriage, David's character is portrayed as so innocently, selflessly, and devotedly in love with Dora that he's naive to his wife's unsuitability for him; by the time he does clue into her unsuitability as a life partner, he's portrayed as a self-denying martyr who puts her happiness before his. It's artless, transparently self-flattering, and frankly obnoxious to read. Nothing yanks me out of a story faster than seeing the author so obviously tugging on the puppet strings.

 

I'd already known, years before reading this book, that Dickens had cheated on his wife and that the marriage ended unhappily. That in itself didn't deter me from reading more Dickens. Marriages end all the time, I didn't know any specifics, and I don't expect moral purity from the writers I read. But it's one thing to know the fact, and it's quite another to read hundreds of pages of intentional, egregious, and very public character assassination of his own wife. And it's impossible to ignore its presence in the story, because Dickens' disdain for his real wife hamstrung his ability to write a convincing character. 

 

It’s a profound failure of imagination (the writer’s very stock and trade) on Dickens’ part that he could not conceive of Dora having an interior life of more substance than simply being a mindless imbecile “child-wife," and it's this lack of imagination that was the final nail in the coffin of my patience. I have no grace left to give this book.

 

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

Finished on: 12/31/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

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I enjoyed the hell out of this book. Incredibly well-researched and thorough, my attention was hooked immediately and easily sustained for 300+ pages. Winkler tackles perhaps one of the thorniest debates in literary history with deft intelligence and a dash of snark. This book is a fascinating dive into the history of “the authorship question,” following various historical threads that have formed the knots of scholarly debate, and laying it all out for readers to evaluate themselves. When I wasn't reading this book, I was thinking about it—to the point that I'm the owner of a new hyperfixation, because this book will be sending me down the rabbit hole of scholarship on this subject (I have already purchased one of the books cited in Winkler's text). The book strikes the perfect balance of giving readers plenty to sink their teeth into without completely overwhelming us in minutia. The structure, pacing, and organization of information are all fantastic.

The only reason this book isn't a five-star read for me? The final chapter is weak—probably the weakest of the whole book. I did not at all expect Winkler to provide answers to "the authorship question," or to share whichever candidate she most favors as the author (if any), but I did expect a little more reflection in the concluding chapter, some broader synthesis and consideration of the body of research Winkler conducted. What, now, is the significance of all this research for her? What's the impact? Has any of it changed her own relationship to Shakespeare, or to higher education and the academy, or to her confidence in how we preserve (and ignore, and shape, and rewrite) history? She touches on the latter two points through the book, but I suppose I expected more thorough reflection on them in the conclusion. Instead, we're given a rather odd anecdote of an interview that Winkler clearly found frustrating, and I'm left to wonder why it was included. Why was that the final scene of the book? Why did one scholar's (apparent) apathy on the authorship question merit the concluding scene of the book? I'm not sure the anecdote did merit the spot, which made the conclusion feel a bit hollow to me. Disappointing after such a wonderfully meaty book.

That being said: don't let a weak final chapter deter you from picking up this book. It's absolutely worth the read.

Orbital

Finished on: 12/18/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

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Samantha Harvey said in an interview that she wanted to write a "space pastoral," and Orbital is the fruit of that effort. I think Harvey not only succeeded in her goal, but also wrote a moving love letter to Earth and to humanity. 

 

The experience I had reading this novel was sort of like standing before a painting—maybe Pollock's Shimmering Substance, or van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône—and falling into its colors, its shadings, its intimations of movement across the canvas. This novel revels in descriptive imagery, in capturing the light and colors and textures of a rotating Earth as seen from 250 miles above it. As part of her research, Harvey watched hours of NASA footage from the International Space Station, which is evident in how well she evokes the astronauts' view through the space station's windows. 

 

And while Orbital beautifully describes planetary movements and the shimmering spread of galaxies, I found myself most engaged by its tender attention to the human beings aboard the space station. The readers become privy to the ordinary habits, conversations, and inner thoughts of these six astronauts, and these passages were my favorites of the book. I love that Harvey honors the everyday human concerns—how do you sleep in space? eat? pee? work your muscles?—that shape daily experience (and thus our lives). I love how the astronaut's everyday concerns effortlessly flow into meditations on the nature of time, human ambition, and our place in the universe. 

 

Readers get to see the astronaut's complex feelings about being in space, how they both long for and dread returning home, how their vantage point from space has re-contextualized their understanding of their own lives on Earth. For instance, we see the Japanese astronaut, Chie, receive news that her mother passed away while Chie is in orbit. We see her struggle with grief that feels displaced—literally at a remove from its rightful place, there, down on Earth—and yet her attempts to situate her grief, to make sense of it, are so easily recognizable to any of us. The environment in which it occurs may feel alien, but that ancient human impulse is intimately familiar. The novel consistently threads this needle with other characters, too, and it's a joy to read. 

 

This is not a story-driven novel, nor is it even an especially character-driven novel (despite how good the character vignettes are): it's a novel about place. It's a novel about human belonging to Earth, and our simultaneous yearning to pass beyond Earth's boundaries. Its sustained attention to imagery asks us to do what great paintings also ask us to do: fall into the colors and lighting and textures and see where we land.

 

It feels appropriate to end on these passages from the novel: 

 

"When he's seen through a telescopic lens the flowlines made by ships pulling at the ocean, or the ancient shorelines of Bolivia's bright orange Laguna Colorada, or the red sulphur-stained tip of an erupting volcano, or the wind-cut folds of rock in the Kavir Desert, each sight has come to him as a winching open of the heart, a crack at a time. He'd not known how capacious it was, the heart. Nor how in love he could be with a ball of rock; it keeps him awake at night, the vitality of this love.

 

[...] So many astronauts and cosmonauts have passed through here, this orbiting laboratory, this science experiment in the carefully controlled nurturing of peace. It's going to end. And it will end through the restless spirit of endeavour that made it possible in the first place. Striking out, further and deeper. The moon, the moon. Mars, the moon. Further yet. A human being was not made to stand still."

Something in the Woods Loves You

Finished on: 12/10/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐  

 

                                         

 

On finishing this book, I initially wanted to rate it somewhere around 2 or 2.5 stars. After reflecting on it a bit longer, I've decided to bump it up to 3 stars for a couple reasons: I respect the ambition behind this book, and I admire Jarod Anderson's honesty and vulnerability in discussing a difficult subject. As a fellow sufferer of lifelong depression, I can imagine the courage it took to publicly share his experiences.  

 

So while the content of the book—its subjects and themes—has merit, its execution and presentation aren't doing it any favors.

 

Firstly, this book is marketed as literary memoir when, in fact, it reads much more like self-help. While there are certainly elements of memoir present—Anderson uses his lived experience as a prism through which to explore healing from depression—I'd argue the book devotes most of its pages to describing and extrapolating on therapeutic coping/healing tools. This makes it feel like reading self-help, which is exacerbated by some of Anderson's stylistic choices, such as directly addressing the reader and adopting a conspicuously motivational tone through much of the prose. 

 

I want to emphasize: there is nothing wrong with writing or reading self-help. But when a book presents as literary memoir (which is how the dust jacket and all the marketing materials describe it), and a reader expects literary memoir, it's jarring to pick up the book and find self-help instead. 

 

That’s not to say there’s no literary craft here. I underlined a handful of passages for their loveliness; some chapters make strong use of metaphor to explore their chosen subjects (“Morels,” “White Trillium,” and “Fieldmouse” stand out to me in this regard). Anderson's writing is strongest when he's sketching the outlines of metaphor and allowing the readers to fill in the rest. 

 

That being said, the structure and style of this book often undermine its strengths. The chapters are structured like blog posts rather than chapters in a narrative. Had I read these chapters in the form of blog posts, I'd likely be far less critical of the writing, because the aims of a blog post are different from the aims of literary narrative. Blog posts can afford to be more loosely structured, they are meant to be informal, and as such they are typically less concerned with concision of language. But chapters in a literary memoir? Cohesive narrative that relies on imagery and metaphor to drive meaning? That must be concerned with linguistic concision, it must strive for precision in imagery—and too many of these chapters fail to do that. They are too unfocused, too repetitive, and far too wordy.

 

It’s that repetition and wordiness that bothered me the most as I read through the book, because it feels like a symptom of the author’s distrust of his readers. Anderson is not confident that readers can parse his metaphors and imagery, so he follows them up with bald explication of their meaning. There's no room given for us to simply sit with the metaphor, to let it play in our imaginations and inform how we interpret the text. Instead, the author insists on explicitly stating what is already clearly communicated via imagery/metaphor, and it gets old fast. It's the irritation of hearing a hammer repeatedly bash the same nailhead. "Enough," I kept thinking, "I get it. I promise I get it. Can we move on now?" 

 

The central concepts of the book are also on repeat, continually repackaged and re-delivered to the reader. While I get that Anderson is trying to create touchstones that connect the chapters, the repetition becomes tedious. It feels like another form of authorial distrust: the reader can’t be trusted to remember and link themes/concepts between chapters, so those concepts must all be repeated ad nauseam. 

 

Ultimately, despite meditating on meaningful subjects, Anderson does not make the best use of his chosen genre, which creates a frustrating reading experience. If this book had been more memoir than self-help, and had the prose valued concision and trusted its readers, I would’ve enjoyed it more.

 

For anyone interested in reading literary memoir centered on the author's relationship to their environment, and which makes the most of the genre's strengths, I'd recommend:

 

• The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry by Joe Wilkins
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard 
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green
• Literally any of the nonfiction written by Barry Lopez or Wendell Berry, you can't go wrong

 
 (P.S. It's not the same without you, Starr, but I'm ready to carry on this little project of ours. Miss you, and thinking of you every time I finish a great book.)
 

I am sad to say that this blog has come to its end. It will stay as it is—I will leave the posts up for the sake of posterity—but it will not be updated any longer. I simply don't have the heart to continue it. My dear friend, and co-founder of this blog, Aurora, died on December 12, 2011. This is a blog we created, maintained, and loved together. Without her, it can't be the same, and frankly, I can hardly bear to look at it, let alone write for it.

So this is it. To the (entirely theoretical) readers who might stumble upon this blog by accident or boredom or serendipity, I hope you enjoy what's here.

Blood Red Road by Moira Young

There are several things that pop in my mind when I think dystopia. First thing of course, is government control. Second thing that runs through my head is a list of dystopian novels: 1984, Brave New World, Little Brother, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale etc. etc.

You may have noticed my version of dystopias most always involve government control and the fight to overturn it. That's because I like a good intellectual fight of average man versus the greater powers! Yet, there is the other side of dystopias. The Mad Max's' of dystopias. The Cormac McCarthy dystopia.

This is one of those. Blood Red Road has a wonderful post apocalyptic setting. Even better, you don't know why there was a grand destruction of civilization! You just know that the technologically advanced are referred to as Wreckers. Which seems to rather point to who is at fault.

Saba lives with her twin brother Lugh, little sister Emmi, and her Pa on the edge of a dried up lake. They've always lived there. Interaction with other humans is limited to a handful of people. Pa says that the world outside is a bad place, and it's better to avoid it. Then the worst happens and Saba is thrown into the unknown in order to try and save her brother.


“Lugh goes first always first an I follow on behind. An that's fine. That's right. That's how it's meant to be.” 


I think this is a great read for people who enjoyed the main character Katniss from The Hunger Games. Saba is irascible and almost heartless at times. Almost. Which leaves plenty of room for character development. Which is always nice to have! Flat characteristics are totally for male protagonists. 


I  picked this up because someone recommended it if you had a fondness for The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. I can see why that may be. There's overwhelming odds, fantasy, and a fight for the right and good!


Fans of YA fantasy, dystopians, or just good characters should pick this up and give it a read. 

The Wolves of Mercy Falls

I read The Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy over the summer holiday in a last desperate grab of pointless fiction before the school term started. They are, if you must know, shamelessly genre typed into paranormal romance.  The paranormal factor here being Werewolves.

Alas, I did know this before I read them. The genre paranormal romance has always been sketchy, but it hasn't always rang bells of warning. Thanks to Twilight,  I now associate the genre with bad writing and corny characters. Which isn't true of EVERY book to the genre...These weren't absolutely dreadful. I read all THREE books. (They're decently short lengthed.)

General Overview: These are books set in Mercy Falls; a gloomy town in the north where it's super cold and there's a dark wood. There are also Werewolves. The general populous only knows that there is  a wolf problem and every few years there is an attack.

The main character, Grace, was attacked when she was younger, but still loves the wolves. One especial wolf that she looks forward to seeing every winter....

The wolves are changed by the weather, not the full moon. Prompting a strangely irritating avoidance of cooler temperatures throughout the book.




Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

Enough depth of character and plot to keep you reading til the end. Though, there is definitely some creepiness there that borders bestiality/stalking. Is an okay read if you enjoy emo-ness, near bestiality, or stalking.

Linger

Was a better read than Shiver and the best book of the three. There's several point of views, and those point of views are from significantly different characters.  I'd recommend this to someone if they asked me  for a good fluff read about werewolves.

Forever

This one boils down to the author saying, "....Oh look I'm going to try and scientifically explain werewolves!! I FAILED!!! Do readers want resolution?! TOO BAD, LOSERZZZZZ!!!!"


 PROS: The version of Forever I read had red lettering. That's pretty awesome. You CAN tell that the author tried really hard to get good characterization, and it shows.

CONS: I've read better fanfictions.