Charles Dickens

[IlsaLund]

I have just read Great Expectations for the first time and I loved it - I found myself sneaking back upstairs to read another chapter when I had five minutes.

It's the first Dickens I have read - can anyone recommend which one I should read next?

Have to add I am ludicrously excitied at having discovered a 'new' (to me) author. For some reason I didn't think I would enjoy Dickens - in face I started GE fully expecting to be bored and give up after a few chapters

Bleak House. It was his best IMHO

Hate Dickens. Great stories but its the way he tells 'em

Now Thackery ...

Tell me more about Thackery... I seem to have huge gaps in my Classic type reading so I am open to all suggestions

Second the PG Wodehouse recommendation. I always think that, like Dickens, there are always TV adaptations being made of Jeeves and Wooster, but the real enjoyment is in the narration, which you miss on screen.

Vanity Fair is wonderful - Becky Sharp is one of the great creations of fiction, a ruthless, shameless, heroic social climber and flirt. Amelia Sedley (whom, one suspects, Dickens would have been fawning all over) is one of the great milksops of literature - I'm sure Thackeray had great fun raining on her parade. Glorious book, read it straight away.

A big fan of Hard Times here. I think it's a real page turner and easy reading.

Oh Great Expectations was my dad's favourite book.
On his grave stone we had inscribed "what larks Pip"
Nephew has it tattooed up his forearm too

Aw Deaddei. My dad always quotes 'what larks Pip' as well.

Please read A Tale... I feel evangelical about it - like I need to spread the word so people can discover it.

I second David Copperfield.

It's interesting that death in those days occupied the same amount of writing that sex does in modern novels - and the same importance, in that everything kind of leads up to it. DC has one of the least extravagant death scenes of Victorian literature in it - very beautiful. But sex (and its outcome) is mentioned very little - so when we read that Dora may feel better with the pattering of some tiny feet I thought she was going to get another dog (I did read it for the first time when I was quite young...)

I also love Silas Marner, and most Hardy. I can't think of anything that's been mentioned that's not worth reading - but some of them wear their historical timeframe and consequent ideology in more or less intrusive ways. I love, and hate, reading Lady Chatterley's Lover for this reason.

For a different take on the same period try Emile Zola. I was sniffy about Dickens when I was studying this period of lit and read a lot of Zola instead. Have come round to Dickens with age!

Enjoy!

Thank you everyone. melezka I love Zola.

I think I must have been too young when I first attempted Dickens - I was a voracious reader and remember borrowing some from the library when I was about 10 and not enjoying it at all - whereas I didn't discover Hardy (who I love) until I was a few years older.

I am going to read more Dickens and then I think I will try Thackery - what riches!

I loved Dickens as a teenager and can't bear him now. All those wimpy heroines pining away in corners.

But Tale of two cities and David Copperfield were my favourites. Mme Defarge is an antidote to the wilting women.

Estella is NOT wilting.

No, Estella doesn't wilt, but I didn't really like GE that much. Lucie Manette wilts, as does Dora in DC, and the super-drippy Esther in Bleak House. Agnes in DC doesn't wilt but she's so horribly good and patient you want to trample on her. Nell wilts to death in TOCS.

I think GE appeals to the melodramatic side of me....pure victorian melodrama, but so much more than that too....some of the prose when pip professes his love for estella in front of miss havisham is beautiful and powerful as miss havisham realises the enormity of her meddling....sigh....must read it again....

Loved David Copperfield, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit. Funny, I didn't love GE as much as the others I've read. Tale of two cities very touching but I love his comedic characters and it lacked them a bit.

Must re-read Vanity Fair - I loved it when I read it at 19/20 but would like to give it another run through.

Not a massive Hardy fan - they were all so depressed.

I am reading Clarissa at the moment - 370 pages in and it's only starting to hot up but I've come round to it and am starting to get hooked on it. I am a massive Georgette Heyer fan and it's of the same sort of regency period

I have never read any Zola (that I can remember) so will have to have a go at that too.

Bollocks - just checked and the Regency period was a whole 100 years later than the period in which Clarissa is set! Ooops.

Oh god, Clarissa! I had to read it for my degree and the size of it practically dislocated my wrist. Although it was surprisingly good!

I know; I have been reading it on the tube which far from ideal. Someone offered me a seat the other day because it looked so heavy. So there is an upside.

If you wrapped it in a blanket people might think it's a baby and give up their seat every time!

Lol!

You could croon gently at it.