I finally got around to finishing the last third or so of Great Expectation, and it was as good as it was every other time I've read it. While finishing it I've been struck with the particular joy of enjoying something which is not a flight of sheer brilliance or a unique achievement, but simply a job well done, but really well done. Its the difference between a Citizen Kane and a Casablanca. Its the sort of thing that makes something like The Borne Identity or Toy Story Two so much fun, you know what you're getting into, you know what to expect, and then its done really well. I like to read something like Gatsby or Lolita, but sometimes its nice to read someone who wrote installments in magazines and was paid by the word, but earned that pay with every one of those words. Someone who is writing books as a job, not out of some grand artistic vision, but who is the best at that job that the world can find.

Now if only I could go back in time and convince Dickens to keep the first ending he wrote:

"Tell me, as an old, old friend. Have you quite forgotten her?"
"My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy, all gone by!"

It was four years more, before I saw herself... [A paragraph or so about her life]

I was in England again--in London, and walking along Piccadilly with [my nephew]--when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.

"I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!" (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)

I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be."