Real Name: Charles John Huffam Dickens
Education: To pay for his board and to help his family,Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten hour days. He eventually went to the Wellington House Academy in North London.
Occupation: English writer, considered to be the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. Dickens is responsible for some of English literature's most iconic novels and characters.
First Book: A Dinner at Poplar Walk 1883 was published in the London periodical, Monthly Magazine.
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Constable & Robinson is getting into the Dickens bicentennial spirit, publishing a novel re-examining the events of Bleak House.
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posted by Neil
I stood on the scales this morning, and saw numbers I've not seen for about 20 years. I'm now about 25-30lbs lighter than I was when I started. I saw Lorraine's trainer yesterday afternoon to get a new weights routine for home and on the road, and realised that I now have muscles that I haven't had since I was 22 and working on a building site. And I thought,
really, audiobooks do not get enough credit for being wonderful things.It sort of started back in January, when I saw the photos from Sydney Opera House, and I noticed something that I'd noticed from the other side, which was that I seemed to have developed a prosperous middle aged belly. My lovely Oscars waistcoat that Kambriel made me was straining to keep it in...
Author in January with straining waistcoat and glorious wife.
And I didn't really like that. I didn't like that I was starting to feel, well, my age. Authoring is a sedentary profession, and I was feeling pretty sedentary. (And, according to the
New York Times,
sedentary may be lethal.)
When I got back to the US I talked to Amanda's best friend Anthony about it, and about wanting to get myself into shape for the next thirty years, and he suggested a book he'd found really useful called
Younger Next Year, which I ordered and read with interest. I liked the book, and thought, I ought to put this into practice.
It said, among other sensible things, that I should exercise for 40 minutes a day, getting my heart rate up. And I should do weights...
And I thought, But Dear God I'll Be So Bored.
And that was when I had one of those ideas that ought to come with floating lightbulbs. I thought, Bleak House. A book I loved, but had never finished, due to always leaving it places.
I've been chatting to the Audible.com people about a mysterious thing I'll announce soon, and Don Katz from Audible had shown me the Audible app and mentioned that I could now use my Amazon account to log in and buy books on Audible. So I downloaded the Audible app to my phone and to my iPod touch. I listened to samples of a dozen Bleak Houses, then plumped for the top-rated, which sounded excellent. And from that point on, most days, I did 40 minutes a day of Bleak House. And if I couldn't do 40 minutes I'd do half an hour, or 20 minutes. I'd exercise, and I'd lose myself in Dickens, and the time would fly by.
It's a glorious book, and perfect for an audio book -- Hugh Dickson narrates it with skill and deftness, managing the varying voices of the enormous cast with ease and accuracy, coping with the two narrators (Miss Esther Summerson and a mysterious, all-seeing present tense narrative voice) into the bargain. A landscape I could get lost in, aided by the Audible software that always kept track of where in the book I was (I did not trust it at first, and would bookmark at the end of every session, but slowly learned to trust it). (
0 Comments on No. I will not write a diet book. But this worked for me... as of 1/1/1900
