Wikipedia's entry on Our Mutual Friend has a long (though incomplete - gulp) list of the major and minor characters in this work - could be a useful reference . . . en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Mutual_Friend

My copy of The Golden Bowl hasn't arrived yet, so that is going to have to get shelved, and I'll start where I'm supposed to start - with Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. Several nutty family members have mentioned they want to read this one along with me - well, folks, if you're up for 800 pages of Dickens (and probably as many characters to keep straight), I'm happy to have you join me!

For any other friends, family members, or total strangers who might want to read along with me this spring, here are the course descriptions and reading lists:

Fictions of Finance
Nineteenth-century England, France, and America witnessed the transformation of the capitalist enterprise: both moved from societies dominated by industrial production to those in which finance capital generated vast new fortunes—and vast new possibilities as well of social disequilibrium. At the same time, the realist novel emerged as the dominant social form, defining the lineaments of experience for an enlarging middle-class readership eager to understand the complexities of this brave new world. What, this course wonders, do these two phenomena have to do with each other? What new plots get created, what new character-types get shaped, in the realist novel to register, manage, negotiate the transition into this new world? How do authors respond to their own role, as authors, in this sphere? How do changing notions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, racial, and national (or even, in James, global) identity get made and remade in this fictional encounter? These will be some of the questions we discuss as we make our way through a number of great, complex, and long novels that redefined as they participated in the fictions—and the facts—of finance. Students will be required to write two papers, one short, one long. Please read Our Mutual Friend before the summer begins, since we'll really have only a week to devote to it.

Texts: Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Penguin); Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister (Penguin); Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low (Penguin); Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Scribner); Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Penguin).

Identities in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
This course turns on the fundamental questions of how nineteenth-century writers both chronicle and help create the processes by which Americans articulate various types of identity, from the personal to the communal to the national. In pursuit of some answers, we will read the following primary texts in this order listed below.

Texts: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," "The American Scholar," "The Divinity School Address," "Self-Reliance," "Fate," and "Experience" in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Random House); Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Modern Library); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Norton); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Norton); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Norton); selected poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. A substantial packet of secondary readings will be assigned in Vermont.

Here we go!

My revitalized reading life begins with The Golden Bowl, by Henry James (for my "Fictions of Finance" course this summer). I saw it on my dad's shelf when I was home visiting for Easter, and thought I'd just dip in . . . it probably wasn't the best book to start with. I'm now successfully chugging through, but the first few pages were pretty daunting. Maybe I shouldn't have been trying to read it in the kitchen with family floating in and out . . . maybe I needed coffee . . . maybe this is going to be harder than I thought . . .

Any Golden Bowl fans out there?