Today is Rainy

Today is rainy which is sort of a bummer because I had intended to go hiking. I have not been able to go this week, partly because of busy-ness and partly because of my own laziness in not getting up early enough in the morning to have a decent hike. But today, I intended to go hiking, got up early enough for a full morning of hiking, but alas, the weather was poor. It has been raining on and off the whole day and a thick mist has settled in the valley. It was not a good day for a hike. So instead of a vigorous morning of hiking, I neglected getting dressed until the last possible moment before work, made myself a coffee, settled myself snuggly under my blankets, and read the whole morning. I have been reading Charles Dickens' Bleak House, which though I am only about 200 pages into the thousand page novel, appears to becoming quite good. It is interesting to compare it with the Pickwick Papers, which I read this summer past, and is his first novel. Bleak House is one of his last, written in the 1850s. His development as an author is extremely apparent. The characters are as rich as ever, from eccentric Mr. Jaurdyce to the simple cockney street urchin, Jo. However, in Bleak House, each character plays an integral part in driving the story foward. With each character, the air of mystery unveiled at the novel's opening is in the first two-hundred pages not only not cast off, but is in fact, deepening as the story progresses. What is the true nature of the wards brought into the Jaurdyce household.? What place do they have in twisted web of the ongoing legal cause of Jaurdyce v. Jaurndyce? Dickens is able to draw us into the story, guessing as to what is really going on. The Pickwick Papers, despite its brilliant character development fails to integrate them into a cohesive story. It is a work that rests on its constituent episodes rather than the whole. Bleak House, from what I read, seems to be work, though episodic in some respects (as a serialized novel, it had to be) but seems to be able to be judged well as a whole.