There are a lot of retirement books out there, so I went with the one with a recognizable name and I'm glad I did. My parents haven't thought enough about retirement and I wanted to spur them to action. They were pleased to find out that there were many things they could do now, even at this late date, to help them, and they even starting giving me tips on ways I could start planning. So then I gave this book to my husband's parents who are already retired, and they ended up buying it for friends too. There are tons of tips, easy things you can do, worksheets, charts, action lists, tips--even a section on how to overcome adverse events like losing your job and divorce. It is worth the read. You'll learn a lot and be happy you did.

The first half of the novel is by turns charming and enlivening. David's challenges make it difficult for a man not to identify with his youthful trials. The bridges between acts - written with the reminiscence of an old man - are enough to make a man of 25 look back wistfully at his youth. Add the zany, lovable characters and this becomes my favorite Dickens - so why just four stars?
Some modern readers might find introduction a tad slow; forewarned, however, they should overcome it, as it is fairly interesting. More seriously, the major subplot (Little Em'ly, Steerforth, and Ham) is resolved too melodramatically in the latter half, which seems out of place with the more natural style of the rest of the novel. This flaw keeps it from being a top-shelf classic, but is in no way destructive to the novel. It is extremely enjoyable.

Phew! This took awhile to read, but fortuantely, I had anticipated that. I gave it 4 stars because that is how I felt about it when I finished it. Knowing that it is a Charles Dickens novel and touted as an all time great, I feel like I should have given it 5 stars. However, I'm sticking with my gut feeling.

David Copperfield is a character that I will never forget. How could I? I lived with him for almost 3 months! I will also remember the many other characters, as Dickens ability to bring them to life is his forte.

Perhaps the reason why I couldn't give it a fifth star is the reason why people gave it negative reviews. There may have been times when a little too much description was given which made it drag slightly. It may well be that due to the fact that he wrote in installments and got paid by the page, that the overall novel is sort of overdone. Some parts were a bit hard to trudge through, which meant I wasn't always compelled to read it. I loved the overall story, the many subplots, and the various personalities. One of my favorite characters is his Aunt Betsy. For anyone who thinks the female characters were all the same, I wonder if they skipped the scenes with the Aunt...or Martha for that matter.

I hope that when and if I have fulfilled my insatiable hunger for the pile of books I haven't read, I can read this again and gain a better understanding of it. I am sure I missed a lot.

I wouldn't have appreciated this book when I was in high school, or probably even college. I think it would take a rare young person to have the patience to stick with it, with all the other crazy things that happen at that time of life. I'm glad that I was able to wait until a point in my life where I was ready to read this book and it wasn't shoved down my throat by some professor.

David Copperfield was always a favorite of mine. It is wonderful, how, circling with the years, I can make my own retrospect and read it again from my older perspective.

When I was younger, I too, wanted to complain that all of Dickens' heroines were the same, and now I realize how wrong I was. Agnes is good and beautiful and patient of course, but what about the heroine Aunt Betsey? What about Miss Mowcher, who gives David a piece of advice "from three foot nothing ... Don't confuse bodily defect with mental!" she exclaims, and this is advice we coudl still use today! What about Peggotty, who is true and good and occasionally silly? Then there are the women who are not so good: Mrs Heep, Miss Murdstone, Mrs Markleham (the Old Soldier) and Rosa Dartle?

Dickens' characters are marvelous, but what I find most wonderful is the love that brings them together. Aunt Betsey takes David in, and is rewarded by the softening of her own heart; Mr. Peggotty seeks and finds his niece; Traddles finally marries "the dearest girl" and long-suffering Mrs Micawber will never desert her husband and something at last turns up Down Under. The characters who are courageous enough to choose love over pride are almost always rewarded at the end -- assuming that they survive, of course! (I'm thinking of Ham.) Perhaps it is just a novel, and those who have courage to love are not always rewarded in real life, but the idea is wonderfully satisfying.

This book seems to have polarised its many online reviewers. I'm not really surprised. David Copperfield is Dickens at his very best and occasionally (but only occasionally) at his worst. It is a long book; the sentimentality is poured on with a shovel; there are long passages that don't seem to take the plot anywhere. But it has some of Dickens' greatest characters; the plot is powerful and driving; and the first person narrative (unusual for Dickens) makes the story particularly involving. Overall, it deserves to be considered one of Dickens best books. The major low for me was the 'child wife' character - dreadfully unreal and irritating. But the contrast to this was Steerforth, who I rate as perhaps the most interesting and believable character Dickens has ever created. Unlike so many of Dickens' cartoon villains, Steerforth walked the all too human line between good and evil so beautifully that, like David Copperfield, one could hardly help loving him even when we are despising him. Uriah Heep may be the character most reviewers mention, but it is Steerforth that makes David Copperfield my favourite Dickens novel.

Charles Dickens is a master at re-creating the world. Throughout most of his books, Dicken's own life is recreated time and again, always with a different plot but with the same basic truths. In "David Copperfield", we go along the protagonist through his troubled and orphane childhood, his sufferings in terrible public schools, his trip to the beach to visit his nanny, his life with the stern yet loving aunt Miss Betsie Trotwood, the intrigues of the despicable yet fearsome Uriah Heep, his marriage to the childish and immature Dora, the betrayal by a trusted friend, success without happiness, and finally the encounter with true love, in the form of a friend from youthness.

The characters are all people you find during your own lifetime: your friends, your aunt, your sweetheart, that woman you love but you can't stand, etc. Copperfield is the story of a good man in his learning through difficulties and setbacks.

No wonder it is still read and probably will stay alive through the decades: Copperfield has something to tell us all.

Both critics and Charles Dickens himself generally class
"David Copperfield" as his "greatest" novel. The strains of autobiography and the rich array of comic and tragicomic characters give the reader the best of Dickens' wit and social outrage. As the years go by, though, people begin to speak of David Copperfield as a "set piece", a bit of Victoriana different in format but not in importance from a very natty
but a bit days-gone-by bit of antique furniture. This view misjudges the novel. This book presents a rich set of characters in a complex novel, deeply satisfying and in many ways still a very modern work. It's very hard to write about "good" and "evil" without descending into morality play, but this novel succeeds. The story is broken into three
"threads": a young boy, orphaned early, endures an unhappy childhood refreshed by periods of happiness (and comedy);
that same boy goes through late adolescence, and comes "into his own"; and finally, the narrator, now a man, sees the resolution of the various plot threads built through the early parts of the novel. Many Dickens themes are played out here--the superiority of goodness to affluence, the persistence and affrontery of fraud, and the way in which social institutions frequently hinder rather than advance their stated goals. The book does not read like a polemic, though--it reads like a bit of serial fiction (which in fact it was).

If you are hunting a good, solid read about values and
curious characters, David Copperfield stands ready to show you his world.

Kit's Wilderness written by David Almond takes place in a fictional middle-class town called Stoneygate. Stoneygate used to be a coal-mining town. The main character- thirteen year-old Kit Watson moved to Stoneygate, along with his mother father and grandfather, after his grandma died. He discovered he has somewhat of a legacy to live up to due to the fact that his ancestors have lived there for a while and the name Watson is well known. Kit meets another boy- John Askew, and John claims the two of them are linked because their ancestors were linked as well. John is a troublemaker and his family is the worst in town. Kit also meets a girl named Allie Keegan and becomes good friends with her. After a series of events makes Kit and John seem more connected, John gets kicked out of school. Out of anger, he runs away. Everyone in town thinks John is bad news and Kit shouldn't be hanging out with him but Kit thinks there is good in John. When Kit goes looking for John in an abandoned coal mine, will John show his bad side to Kit out of anger or will Kit be able to save John?
I am not a huge fan of Kit's Wilderness. However, I did not dislike the book an extreme amount, either. Overall, I thought the plot was slow moving and the climax was not very exciting. At the beginning of the book, the author does not give the reader anything substantial to base John and Kit's link. The reader is just supposed to take the author?s word for it. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the relationship between Kit and Allie. I enjoyed Allie's character in general. Another highlight is that the short chapters and three divisions allow the story to go by quickly.
I would relate this book to October Sky because they are both set in the same kind of town. Overall, Kit's Wilderness was mediocre but had high points.

I think that Kit's Wilderness is a clever, well written novel, for children and adults of any age above 10. Almond links together the different plots very well. The book somehow connects good with evil and dark with light. The book takes thrilling turns and unexpected twists.It has you on the edge of your seat and you don't want to put it down - you want to find out what happens next. The book takes you through an excitng adventure that includes all aspects of Kit's life at Stoneygate. The main characters in the book are: Goodie-two-shoes Kit, strange John Askew, bossy Allie Keenan, and Kit's Grandpa who used to work in the mine. I think that the characters are very well thought out and they are described very well. My favourite part is where Kit goes into the mine with Askew. I like it because Almond builds up lots of tension.

David Almond writes stories that straddle the line between fantasy and reality, and his second book proves that "Skellig" was not a lucky fluke. "Kit's Wilderness" is haunting and memorable, with good writing and an intriguingly mysterious plot.

Kit Watson's family has recently moved to the mining village of Stoneygate, to care for Kit's aging grandfather after the death of his grandmother. Among his friends are the sullen, cryptic John Askew and the bright aspiring actress Allie. Soon Kit becomes enmeshed in the sinister, ritual-like game called "Death," with a spin-the-bottle knife and a jumble of grisly tokens, and sees wizened children huddled in the mines. He dreams of a prehistoric boy who struggles to survive with his baby sister, and Askew lets him see the graves of two boys -- who were called Christopher Watson and John Askew.

Then Kit's grandfather, who tells him of fossils and a little blond ghost, begins to fail; his memory is beginning to go. When John Askew runs away from home, Kit is drawn to learn more about this strange boy who is so fascinated by death. His search for the past, and for John Askew, will draw him down into the dark mines -- where he will find answers about John, the ghosts, Lak the caveboy, and Death.

"Kit's Wilderness" is one of those books that should be read at least twice, because the hauntingly vague subplots that somehow fit together. The subplots (Silky, Grandfather, Allie's acting aspirations, the game of Death, and Lak) don't really seem to have anything to do with each other. But to Almond;'s credit, he manages to weave them all together. It's a bit confusing, and some people may need to flip back to check it out, though.

Kit is the kind of character that Almond does best, a boy who is sensitive and observant, and we get into his head all throughout the book. Allie and John Askew serve as the yin and yang, the light and the dark. Allie's almost unreal brightness serves as a counterpoint to Askew's darkness. That isn't to say that Allie is all good and Askew is bad; they just have different personalities. Most striking is the relationship between Kit and Askew, with Kit unconsciously trying to draw Askew (who has a messed-up family) closer to the light and away from "death," but only by stepping into the mines and onto Askew's level can he pull his friend back home.

Almond's writing is surreal and stark as the mining town, and his dream sequences are like travelling back in time. His dialogue, as usual, is a bit stilted and peculiar-sounding if it's spoken out loud. But it's a beautiful book that will linger in your thoughts long after you finish it.

i DID NOT THINK OF THIS A A GREAT PIECE GOING FROM THE VIRTORIAN NOVERLIST EARA.