Bleak House

By: Charles Dickens

Narrated by: Sean Barrett

The long, drawn-out case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce provides the background to this novel, which takes us into Dickens' world of impoverished people on the street, lovers fallen on hard times, and the grand riches of the upper classes. It is read movingly by Sean Barrett.

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Critic reviews

"Vigorous satire....[with] a host of interesting minor characters." (The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature)

Excellent

Excellent book and narration. Tried a different narrator first but stopped and bought this very instead. Excellent.

Can't understand female narrator

Dickens can be hard to understand, because there is a huge culture gap between his time and ours. His verbosity, convoluted syntax, and strange vocabulary can make reading difficult and listening even more difficult--to say nothing of his excessive sentimentality and over-dramatization.

According to Wikipedia, Bleak House has 18 main characters and 36 minor characters. Evidently, this did not tax his readers, but it is a bit much for me. I needed a short explanation sometimes, to remind me who some of these people were.

I had little trouble understanding the male narrator, but I could hardly understand the female narrator, she read so quickly. She seemed to think she was reading to a Victorian audience, not someone in the American colonies.