Unusual Uses For Olive Oil - Alexander McCall Smith

This was a very light read and quick to get through, which was nice after David Copperfield's 1100 pages!  Olive Oil is the 4th novel in the Professor von Igelfeld series - McCall Smith describes it as an "entertainment novel" and that it was.  Just a turn of phrase is enough to send me into minutes of laughter, as von Igelfeld, author of the eminently respectable, highly intellectual and highly-prized bestseller: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, gets himself into one scrape or another. von Igelfeld has two rather obnoxious colleagues - Prof. Unterholzer and the librarian Herr Huber, who always talks about his aunt in the nursing home - and life is not made easier for von Igelfeld with these two men, but certainly the reader is richer for having met them! von Igelfeld is a rather Walter Mitty-like character himself, and that is his charm. The series is also a gentle poke at academia and the somewhat fuzzy-headed professors who spend their days there.  A good read, lots of laughs, and - as always with McCall Smith - well-written.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I re-read this 1100 page novel in preparation for April's book club theme.  I was reading Jane Smiley's "Charles Dickens" when I realized I really should read him,too.  Now I must have taught this novel somewhere along the way, or studied it, because the characters were very familiar - David, Peggotty, Steerforth, Dora, Agnes Wickfield et al.  I enjoyed the novel more as an older adult, and constantly marvelled at the complexity of the writing, the fact that it was serialized, and that Dickens wrote this in long-hand!