My Year of Dickens: The Strategy

It's all settled. I'm reading Dickens this year. All of it. I'm very excited, which is good, as I've announced it to the world and to back out now and read Danielle Steel for the year would look bad.

My plan is to read the works in the order written. This seems to make the most sense, and it allows me to read The Pickwick Papers first, which is what Sherry at Semicolon recommended. So, as I wait for the UPS man to deliver my copy of The Pickwick Papers (I had to order it because the only copies I could find locally were Signet Classics, which are about three inches by three inches and feature microscopic print. I have great eyes, but I'm not about to attempt to read Dickens in small print. And don't talk to me about the library; I want to be able to mark in these books, thank you. Same goes for reading the books online, via a website like Bibliomania. Chyah. As if.), I will regale you with my plan. The timeline came from David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page, a great resource I'll most likely be visiting often this year. So, without further ado, the order:

• The Pickwick Papers
  
• Oliver Twist
  
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
  
• The Old Curiosity Shop
  
• Barnaby Rudge
  
• Martin Chuzzlewit
  
• Dombey and Son
  
• David Copperfield
  
• Bleak House
  
• Hard Times
  
• Little Dorrit
  
• A Tale of Two Cities
  
• Great Expectations
  
• Our Mutual Friend
  
• The Mystery of Edwin Drood
  

I will also read A Christmas Carol, but I'm not sure exactly where it fits into the chronology.

That is, roughly, 11,492 pages of reading. I'm never going to finishThis is going to be quite a challenge. Considering that novels published today average about 300 pages, this is the equivalent of reading 38 novels. I'm guessing that a good twenty pages of each book is going to be commentary, which brings the page count down to 11,200 pages. Oh yeah, much better.

But that's not why I'm doing this, right? I'm doing this to read great writing, to immerse myself in one author's works. And I do think this going to be fun, it's the whole "do it in a year" idea that has me regretting that I ever told you this feeling challenged.

I'm thinking I'll have to change the name of my project. My Decade of Dickens? My Mid-Life of Dickens? My Years When My Children Still Lived at Home of Dickens? We shall see.

Update: My copy of The Pickwick Papers has since arrived. Eight-hundred-forty-eight pages of small print. This may end up being "My Year of Dickens, After Which I Needed Bifocals". Just so you know.