finally done!

10 weeks, $1.75 in fines, and a marathon reading section in the downtown library last night and I have finally finished Nicholas Nickleby...whew. It wraps up rather too neatly, but it had already gone on for almost 800 pages.  Nicholas goes on a rant at a farewell dinner for the Crummleses about the "playwrights" that take the writings of other authors, change a few details, perhaps write a new ending (or an actual ending if the novel was serialized) and claim it as their own.  It's funny because that was actually happening with this novel as it was being written, also I think I heard it was one of the reasons why Cervantes finally penned the second half of Don Quixote, there were so many other versions out there that he wanted to set the record straight. The other thing that stood out for me with this novel was how well Dickens understood human motivation and emotional depth.  He was 26 when he began writing this novel, it was his third. (I just read that, earlier I had read it was his second.  He published  The Pickwick Papers between 1836-7 and according to this source http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/#, must have written Oliver Twist  (1837-9) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) somewhat concurrently.) He had had to drop out of school on two separate occaisions, the first when he was 12 and his father ended up in a debtor's prison and then again at age 15, for good.  He was remarkably driven and ambitious.  I realize now that his writing was much more prolific that when I first thought when I took on this challenge, much of it quite hefty in length.  I had been planning on reading The Pickwick Papers  next, however when I ran up to the Dickens shelves and grabbed it, I was thrown off by the thickness of it (around 600 pages) so I grabbed the thinnest one I could find, which happened to be Hard Times which was his tenth novel, not counting the Christmas books.  But that will have to wait, Riding with Reindeer is due tomorrow with 8 holds on it, so I can't renew it, and I've racked up enough fines...but I'm more than half-way thru.