Finished: Great Expectations (Dickens). LOVED this book! It's very surreal to have finished it as the London Olympics Opening Ceremony was coming on. The culminating action sequence in the book took place as a boat rowed along the Thames and I couldn't help but picture the shot of the Thames whenever they show London on television. Anyway....what a tale of rags to riches to humility. I really, really loved it. At first I didn't think I would be able to count Pip as a character I really liked, but the more I read and got to know him, the more I could see that he was just a very young human being with flaws, and, more importantly, he admitted his flaws, learned from his mistakes, regretted his actions, and made amends with his loved ones. I loved all of his relationships...except for the ones with his sister and Estella. Of course, they were the heartless women of the book, imho. The intricacies of the plot, and how different characters related kept me on my toes. It was one of those books that was hard to put down, but I've had alot going on, so I had to put it down. Couldn't wait to get back to it. :-) I thought to myself early on that it was too obvious that Miss Havisham was his benefactor...and something about the way the convict, Able Magwitch, talked to him when he was captured...I just knew he'd end up being Pip's benefactor that put him on his path to riches. I loved Pip's friendship with Herbert Pocket. And, I loved Joe, the husband of Pip's sister, who raised Pip like a son, and was the truest, most selfless friend he had. When Pip came into his riches and was ashamed of blacksmith Joe's "lowness", and consequently lost touch with him purposely, it broke my heart. For Joe to be the person who nursed Pip back to health after he lost all his wealth and almost his life, was such a testament to Joe's character! I haven't read a Dickens book in many years, so forgot what a wonderful writer he is! Of course, I have some favorite passages.

The teenager Pip tells a friend, Biddy, how he would have been satisfied to follow Joe into the business of the forge and settle for a simple life if he hadn't been informed by the lovely, rich Estella that he was low and common:

     "Instead of that," said I, plucking up more grass and chewing a blade or two, "see how I am going on. Dissatisfied, and uncomfortable, and---what would it signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me so?"
     Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.
     "It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say," she remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. "Who said it?"
     I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing where I was going to. It was not to be shuffled off, now, however, and I answered, "The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's and she's more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account." Having made this lunatic confession, I began to throw my torn-up grass into the river, as if I had some thoughts of following it.
     "Do you want to be a gentleman to spite her or to gain her over?" Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause.
     "I don't know," I moodily answered.
     "Because, if it is to spite her," Biddy pursued, "I should think---but you know best---that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think---but you know best---she was not worth gaining over."
     Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was perfectly manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day?

Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer who is sent to tell Pip of his new fortune, gives us the first glimpse of the book's title: :-)

     "I am instructed to communicate to him (Pip)," said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger at me sideways, "that he will come into a handsome property. Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that property that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman---in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations."

After being led on for years by Miss Havisham that she has been his benefactor and that she planned for Pip and Estella, her adopted daughter, to eventually marry, Pip has discovered that Miss Havisham is not his benefactor at all. And, furthermore, that he will soon be poor again. Pip goes to Estella to tell her that he loves her and beg her not to marry a man who will mistreat her, who she doesn't love. Pip is rebuffed by Estella, but finally Miss Havisham is moved and shows she has a heart:

     "Estella," said I turning to her now, and trying to command my trembling voice, "You know I love you. You know that I have loved you long and dearly."
     She raised her eyes to my face on being thus addressed, and her fingers plied their work, and she looked at me with an unmoved countenance. I saw that Miss Havisham glanced from me to her and from her to me.
     "I should have said this sooner, but for my long mistake. It induced me to hope that Miss Havisham meant us for one another. While I thought you could not help yourself, as it were, I refrained from saying it. But I must say it now."
     Preserving her unmoved countenance, and with her fingers still going, Estella shook her head.
     "I know," said I, in answer to that action; "I know. I have no hope that I shall ever call you mine, Estella. I am ignorant what may become of me very soon, how poor I may be, or where I may go. Still, I love you. I have loved you ever since I first saw you in this house."
     Looking at me perfectly unmoved and with her fingers busy, she shook her head again.
     "It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. but I think she did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella."
     I saw Miss Havisham put her hand to her heart and hold it there, as she sat looking by turns at Estella and at me.
  
Pip continues to tell the cold-hearted Estella, that he loves her and will always love her, even though she doesn't return his feelings...because she can't. She's been raised to never give her heart to a man by Miss Havisham, who was left at the alter as a young woman:

     "Nonsense," she returned, "nonsense. This will pass in no time."
     "Never, Estella!"
     "You will get me out of your thoughts in a week."
     "Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since---on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London building are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!"

When Pip faces death from the cruel Orlick, all his transgressions and the way he has cut his loved ones out of his life flashes before him:

     My mind, with inconceivable rapidity, followed out all the consequences of such a death. Estella's father would believe I had deserted him, would be taken, would die accusing me; even Herbert would doubt me, when he compared the letter I had left for him with the fact that I had called at Miss Havisham's gate for only a moment; Joe and Biddy would never know what I had suffered, how true I had meant to be, what an agony I had passed through. The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death.

Love that last line!