This is a 300-page Charles Dickens book, and that is INSANE. Most of them are 5 or 6 hundred, or a thousand! That’s crazy!
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Originally I was just going to say this as a joke, but I realized that this book has a couple themes related to current times, which are also fairly hard times. It has schools teaching nothing but facts, facts, facts, which is rather related to the bloating importance of standardized testing and the limited critical thinking skills that generally involves. There’s a scene where the school dude is all “okay dumb kid, there’s a society, most are doing fine, there are some who are dying, some people doing great. is this a healthy society??” and the kid’s all “well those ones dying probably don’t think so” and the school dude is just “NO!!!!!”
Anyway the other thing is Mr. Bounderby is literally and absolutely all those rich guys who are all “whyyy don’t the poor just pull themselves by their own bootstraps, they just want to eat lobster and candy corn all day and not work, not like me, i started from nothing and made a million million by working hard at my own bootstraps with nothing but my own two arms and uphill both ways” but who got a bunch of money from their rich rich parents. BECAUSE THAT’S TOTALLY WHAT HE DOES. Except his parents weren’t rich but he still said “oh man i had nooothing, everyone else is just whiners” when his parents did a lot to help him.
The books just never stop being relevant.
Duth Olec's Cuckoo Cosmos 