With the warm weather, it occurred to me to revisit an old summer tradition: the tackling of a classic novel. I’ve had ol’ Chuck Dickens’ Bleak House (‘the ultimate legal novel’) on my list for a long while, so i popped into a Nanaimo used bookstore to see if they had a copy. On a tall double shelf labelled ‘Classics’ i found lots of Dickens books, but not that one. I also noticed lots of something else: dead white males, who apparently compose the vast bulk of our ‘classics’ canon.

With one glaring exception: this particular shelf held half a metre of Jane Austen novels. So in solidarity with the feminine, i picked up one of those: Persuasion. Which i’m three chapters into, and making heavy weather of, thanks to the long, looping multi-clausal sentences that are the hallmark of the pre-modern period. Here, for illustration, is the first sentence of the novel (which is also most of the first paragraph):

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