BLEAK HOUSE

Very long, but so very very good that it’s easily won the My Favorite Dickens Novel crown. I’m still working on it (600 pages down, 400 pages to go!), so I’ll say more when I’ve finished. In the meantime, check out this article about how Dickens is the new Austen. I don’t know if I totally buy the assertion that Dickens is trendy based on just the evidence of Masterpiece Theater’s season and a few books, but I like seeing someone make the point that Dickens’s writing is especially relevant to these troubled financial times. (It mentions the a real-estate scam in Martin Chuzzlewit and the Ponzi scheme in Little Dorrit, but I'm surprised it doesn't include this apt quotation from Nicholas Nickleby: “A mania prevailed, a bubble burst, four stockbrokers took villa residences in Florence, four hundred nobodies were ruined.”) And anything that dispels the “Dickens = long and boring and old-fashioned” myth is fine by me. Dickens is so soapy and lively! Even the seriousness is usually melodrama or satire. I won’t say I don’t get impatient with the length at times (particularly when I was forced to gulp down Barnaby Rudge in a single week while in college in England), but that’s more because I’m always impatient to move on to the next book on my list, and having the same book on my bedside table for months on end, even when I’m faithfully plugging away at it almost every day, morally offends me. I’ve been working on this book for so long that I’ve maxed out all my renewals on it at the library! But when I sit down and read and get really into it, the pages just fly by. If I had seven hours to kill, I’d totally watch the miniseries again, too.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, VOL. 1

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 1, by Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neill, et al: Not as lovable as Watchmen, but pretty cool, especially for English majors. Supposedly, every single character is either a literary figure or the ancestor of one, though most of them are from precisely the kinds of proto-genre fiction that my Victorian-lit dorkitude does not encompass. I’ve read Dracula and Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock is dead in the comic, but Mycroft and Professor Moriarty are characters), had 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde read to me as a kid, and was able to spot the references to works like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Oliver Twist, and (lord help us) Pollyanna, but I had to consult Wikipedia and other fan annotations for info on Allan Quatermain (I’ve heard of King Solomon’s Mines, but had no idea there were 14 other related books), Captain Nemo (did you know Verne wrote a sequel to 20,000 Leagues called The Mysterious Island? Me neither), Fu Manchu, The First Men in the Moon, Miss Flaybum (who is a very disorienting character in the comic if you’re not up on your Victorian erotica, and really, who is these days?), and many more. I have limited patience for its steampunk qualities and the graphic violence, but it’s smart, fun, richly (almost dizzyingly) detailed, and very addictive. And Volume 3 is coming out this year!

THE IDIOT GIRL AND THE FLAMING TANTRUM OF DEATH

The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death: Reflections on Revenge, Germophobia, and Laser Hair Removal, by Laurie Notaro: Notaro’s books never stick with me for long after I’ve read them, but they’re reliably amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. This one surprised me by also moving me to tears with an essay about the death of her dog.

PERMANENT ROSE

Third book in Hilary McKay’s Casson series (after Saffy’s Angel and Indigo’s Star), and the best so far, which surprised me, because Rose isn’t my favorite character.