Rooster decided to wake up at 1 a.m., but the rain lulled both of us back to sleep. Then we re-rose at 5:30 to shake Paul out of bed, who needed to be crowed at a mere two times because today is his first day of school and he is moderately if ironically good-humored about it. As requested, I made chocolate pudding for his first-day lunchbox and that, along with watermelon and some new mall-rat pants, seemed to take the edge off the foreknowledge that, in Harmony, 7th grade is almost exactly like 6th grade. (Nothing, of course, makes up for the annoying fact that James doesn't start 11th grade till Tuesday.)

So now that I've booted Paul out of the house, let's get back to the Reading Group. It sounds to me as if all commenters are intrigued by the idea of a simultaneous Dickens and Melville project. Therefore, to begin, I'll offer a brief survey of my own relationship to these novels.

Moby-Dick was the favorite novel of my first serious boyfriend, and thus I avoided reading it. This may have been a sign that our match was not made in heaven. Even all these years later, I have never really made my way into the book, though I've read Billy Budd and "Bartleby" and such. Melville was a poet as well as a novelist; and when I judged the 2010 Maine Poetry Out Loud finals, our second-place winner read "The Maldive Shark" so quietly and intensely that I began to have new ideas about the value one might place on this writer. Yet I've always thought of Melville as distant and masculine, so it's been easy for me to avoid taking his book off the shelf. I'm glad to have this new opportunity to deal with him forthrightly.

Great Expectations, on the other hand . . . well, what can I say? C'est moi. I have lived with this book for so long, for so long; and every time I reread it, I am revived. It quenches my thirst for language, for character, for description, for dialogue. I do love it. I have an essay on Dickens forthcoming in the Sewanee Review, which, while focusing mostly on David Copperfield, does also linger on this novel. Because the essay hasn't been published yet, I shouldn't quote from it, and I won't. But I will say that, when my son was assigned GE in his freshman English class and slogged through it irritably and uncharmed, I did have a pang--not because I think that my children should love all the books that I love but because Dickens has always been the corridor between my child self and my adult self. The doors to that passage have never closed, and they will not close until I die. That's the place that Dickens holds in my life. He knows me better than anyone in the world because, in so many ways, he has made my mind and heart what they have become.

Okay, that's my two cents. And now we need to think up a schedule for beginning the books. Can we do a chapter of each per week? A chapter of one per week? You all have real jobs, so you should decide.