Bleak House - Lots of Potential Scattered and in Shambles

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I wanted to like this book.  I expected to like this book.  Everything seemed predetermined for me to like it. 

It features a looming probate case (which is right up my alley), and it is considered one of the best works by a literary giant.  I gave it many chances and clung to the idea that it would turn, but it never did.  I really did not like this book and was relieved to finish it.

I had never read Dickens before.  Bleak House was clearly not the right book as introduction to his writing (which can be amazing in stretches and just horrible at other times).  Even when it was interesting and started to get good, Dickens ruined it by veering off into idle chit-chat, or switching to a different story line that had already exhausted me, or by simply extending a simple matter for many pages without adding depth (I love extended scenes if it provides depth). 

The mysteries of the book were easily telegraphed and comically foreshadowed, yet the book spun its wheels endlessly before finally making an overly-dramatic reveal to a resolution that had become obvious and stale. 

I really liked how the infamous probate case ended, and it is the exact kind of ending that I was hoping for to that particular story line.  The problem is that the case is really a tiny part of the book.  It is ever-present, but it was never really plumbed to any depth.  Instead, it was a vague background.  When the case came into play, it was interesting and I kept thinking it would reveal more about the motives of the characters, which seemed like such an obvious tool for connecting the characters that I still can't believe how badly that was under-utilized.  Instead, we'd just go back to chit-chat and longings and elaborate conversations without direction.

There was also a spontaneous combustion.  There were some entertaining elements to the people who are "spontaneous combustion chasers," but that whole segment was, again, over-done and campy.

Video Games, Porn, the Constitution, Nazies, and Torture, Oh My!

It's time for a brief rundown because my recent batch of books makes that demand.  The last month or so has been a strange combination.  I'm reading in a glass case of emotion and Charles Dickens is smearing it with mud while taunting me.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, by Patton Oswalt

This was like no other "comedian" book I have read. It was funny, but also artistic.  He wrote about experiences as short stories and changed his voice throughout the book.  At the end his stand-up voice came through most clear and I could hear him wailing his lines like he often does on stage.  I am still digesting it, but I really enjoyed the read.  

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Total nerd candy.  I enjoyed this one as a necessary relief from the monstrosity that will get its treatment below (I need to heed warnings more often).

It's a total 80s nostalgia book that is set in the future.  I realize how messed up that sounds, but it works when a billionaire decides to give his fortune to the first nerd who can solve his video game puzzle based on his 1980s tastes.  If conservatives ever want to know how to keep progress down, just involve video games somehow and the masses will oblige.  Too soon?

So, anyway, it is also a little too close to home because it is also a dystopia theme about people never leaving their homes or engaging in conversation.  They refer to the act of evicting a gamer who stopped paying rent as a "C-Section" and, quite frankly, I know people who may one day face such an event.  Cline describes one such incident so well you can almost see the withered nerd being forcibly unplugged from his gaming module.  It is creepy, but I can't call it outlandish.  I just give a solemn  nod.  



The video games involved were familiar.  As were the movies and television shows.  Everything was  a fun trip down memory lane.  I remember so much of the references and I found myself looking up information about long-forgotten games and shows.  It was a trip.

Good Bye and Good Luck Jack Ryan

So I finished the last Jack Ryan books recently.  Some will know that I have long been a fan of Tom Clancy and primarily the Jack Ryan series.  I started reading Clancy books in High School, starting with Red Storm Rising (not a Jack Ryan book, but the one I wish most they'd made into a movie), and then The Hunt for Red October came out staring Alec Baldwin (Still the best Jack Ryan) which started me on those books.  I liked them enough that I got my friend Chris involved in them too, and we spent many days analyzing each new book that would come out.

Now Clancy usually writes what would be considered Tomes.  Which is to say I believe the average Jack Ryan novel runs over 800 pages.  That's considerably larger than many others in the spy type novel genre, which usually top out at around 400 some pages.  Granted Clancy wrote/ghost wrote several other series that were often shorter but they weren't really his in my opinion.  In fact those were almost as much about cashing in on name recognition for sales, which several other authors in the action genre have done (See the Clive Cussler novels among others).  They also don't involve he core characters/universe he developed and are generally not as good or well thought out.

This being said, until recently, it was a badge of honor for me to have an original hard cover edition of each novel.  Since the last 3-4 yrs I moved to more digital editions, this was the first time this really changed.

For those not in the know, Jack Ryan starts out as an low level CIA Analyst, who then through various sets of key insights or right place/right time combinations manages to make a lot of money in the stock market, save the Duke of Buckingham from terrorists, stop a nuclear bomb in Denver's superbowl, get some high level Soviets to defect, makes peace in the Middle East, helps the drug war in Columbia, and then as he gets to the top of the chain in the CIA begins to move to full politics becoming President after being confirmed as a replacement VP (after getting the corrupt one put in jail) just before a plane smashes into the capital building during a State of the Union, which as you can imagine kills most of the political parties, so they all have to start over.  Then misc challenges from other world powers trying to show the US up.

Anyways, Jack Ryan is almost always the smartest guy in the room, but becomes one along the way willing to do the hard thing, draw a line in the sand which nobody dare cross lest they deal with the Imperial might of the US, etc.

Along the way Jack becomes something of a caricature of an ideal conservative president.  Which I think does him some injustice, especially based on some of the things he'd done in earlier books, but that is what it is.  Tom Clancy was always a very conservative person politically speaking, and after he sort of wrote Jack Ryan into a corner (hard to do most of the same things as before when you're President) he just sort of wrote Jack as he'd want a president to be.  Sort of the John Wayne/Charleston Heston as Commander in Chief role.

Anyways, along the way he developed another character that is probably his second favorite character, but one who could have a more free hand.  John Clark starts out as a CIA Black Ops specialist as a character in several of the early books, but Clancy fell in love with him.  He went so far as to write an entire book as backstory for Clark.  That book is by itself actually very good, although somewhat formulaic.  Clark shows up more often and longer until he basically becomes a core secondary character and involved in nearly everything going on as the hands/feet on the ground working to further US interests.  Domingo Chavez is the younger impersonation of him, and Ding is a good story, but never able to own the scene like any others.  eventually with Jack Ryan as president, Clancy suddenly realizes he needs some more characters and brings Jack Ryan Junior out of the wings, and turns him into a slightly more paramilitary version of his father.  Still very bright analyst but also an operator type more than willing to get his hands wet in black ops work.  Some of the later books take some liberties with this story line, and in fact they bring in a pair of the Ryan cousins who were never mentioned before, so it suddenly becomes a family affair.  That I've thought was a crutch and a bad story choice.  Surely they could find some other patriots who weren't Ryan family.

So this all being said, with Tom Clancy passing away, we will see no more books of this series, at least none by the master himself.  There have been a variety of movies interpretations, but they're all basically flawed in some way or other.  I actually refused to see the Sum of All Fears with Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan, because, well., Ben Affleck.  They also recently had the one with Kevin Costner & Chris Pine, but I didn't have the opportunity to see that in the theater, so I'll check it out when it makes it to DVD.

I expect to see other movies come out over time, as Clancy himself was often a roadblock to the studios in the past, now that he's gone, I imagine the family will want to cash in on that avenue.

Anyways, I'll miss getting new books every couple of years, but who knows, hopefully someone else will be able to step up to the plate over time with something similar.