Not Stopping Believing

I can’t believe I’ve never read Great Expectations. It feels like one of those essential ingredients you’re supposed to have baked into your subconscious at an early age, tucked in there next to that mental map of your childhood backyard and the Solar System Song.

My high school checked off the Dickens box with A Tale of Two Cities instead, which had more than enough spies, murders, and decapitations to keep it from feeling like literary medicine. I remember that guillotine stuff blowing my mind. Sure, Conan the Barbarian and crazy serial killers were head-choppers, but modern governments? The French weren’t as wimpy as I thought. So Dickens knew how to hold an adolescent audience, and anyone that knows me knows the bar hasn’t raised that much. So I’m expectationing Great Expectations will be a good commute-killer.

I enter this endeavour with an open mind and no thoughts of the crappy Ethan Hawke film adaptation. Stay tuned for further commentary.