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.