David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (audiobook)

genre: classic literature

Oh David.  Davy.  Trotwood.  Trot.  Daisy.  Doady.  Copperfield.  All of these are words that are used to name the boy that we watch grow into a man - David Copperfield.  David, whose early life is so painfully tragic, whose story is told in a first person narrative as our author remembers the small tendernesses that sustained him and the large injustices that plagued him as he tried to navigate the world without the kind of loving adult one so desperately needs.  And this is the same David who learns to ask for and accept help, who works things out, who finds his footing and turns into the kind of man whose compassion and patience make him a friend to all kinds of people - an an enemy of a few.   You aren't reading this book because you're dying to know what happens next, necessarily, you read because you start to care about David.  You feel protective of him.  You want him to find happiness.  You sometimes wish he wouldn't be so trusting and you sometimes think he's made a really poor decision.  And yet, in the end, you finish this monster of a story so surprisingly pleased with the journey.

I truly try not to shy away from particular books just because they are exceedingly long - but I absolutely do it.  I have read several of Dickens' books thus far and they've been both hit (Christmas Carol, Tale of Two Cities) and complete miss (Great Expectations).  I haven't had it in me to try another one - until I heard that Barbara Kingsolver was writing a modern retelling of this novel and that was enough to get the idea of trying another Dickens start to simmering in my brain.  Eventually I decided to go the audio route and I am so truly glad I did.  I listened to an edition narrated by Will Watt and he was phenomenal.  It made it so much easier to keep SO MANY CHARACTERS straight by the different voices.  There are villains and fools, school mates and companions, random neighbors that keep showing up, opportunists, mentors and family members and friends that become family.  I actually looked it up and there are 75 distinct characters in this book and they keep showing up!  That person from the beginning?  They are going to show up again!  And maybe again!  So many circumstantial meetings of the same people!  But in the end, I was able to roll with it.  Again, the different voices genuinely helped me to not just track people but to remember how I felt about them too, keeping me continually invested in the story.  Also, sometimes they were just actually funny - David's Aunt Betsy?  Eccentric and Redoubtable, she made me literally cackle out loud at one point, she's so snarky. 

I liked that this is not historical fiction - this is contemporary fiction from the PAST so that the life Dickens is telling me about is the actual kind of lives that people lived in that time from the point of view of a contemporary.  The things they worried about, the way they lived their lives, the ways people could cause harm to each other - those were real, even if the people doing them weren't flesh and blood.  I'm not going to gush.  This wasn't the best novel I've ever read. It is seriously longer than it needs to be - some of these characters just talk and talk and talk, using an entire page to say what could've been conveyed in two strong sentences.  But once I was invested in this character and his life, I was all in.  By the last two hours, I felt actual feelings for him and for how far he'd come in knowing himself.