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I haven't read very many classic novels but the majority I've found hard to get into. I loved 'The Count of Monte Cristo' but found it too difficult to get past the reams of description of Notre Dame is 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame.'

However, I saw some books by Charles Dickens in the library and thought 'why not?' I expected more pages and pages of description but to my surprise...


...he is really good.

I'm reading 'The Old Curiousity Shop'. Dicken's characters are amazing - all of them very interesting.

Has anyone else here read Dickens? What do you think of his works? Have you any novels of his you could reccomend?

Dickens can be tough - his Little Dorrit, although it has a lot of dialogue and plot developement, is really hard to read. But I can't really say that each page is wasted. Reading a Dickens book, you get totally absorbed into the book until you can only finish it in some wonder. His easiest to read book though is "A Tale of Two Cities".

I'm actually reading A Christmas Carol right now. I really like his writing style so far...it's a lot more accessible than some of the other classic writers.

A Tale of Two Cities has the best opening and closing lines of any book I've read, but I hated the rest of it. The first chapter was almost entirely about a carriage going up a muddy hill. It could have been accomplished in a single paragraph.

Somehow I managed to get through school without being forced to read a great many classics, including a Tale of Two Cities (someday I'll go back and make up for that). I can recommend Great Expectations though, which I read last year for fun.

A Tale of Two Cities
The Pickwick Papers(not all the way through though)
Oliver Twist(the second part)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
A Christmas Carol
Our Mutual Friend
Hard Times

I love Dickens, but unfortunately have trouble getting through his books. I have read several books (A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol), and have picked up several more, but I always have trouble getting through his books because of the sheer length of his sentences. I find Dickens wonderful and hard to read for the same reason: his language is exceedingly rich, verbose, and dense. His descriptions are wonderful, but he describes EVERYTHING, making even simple passages sleep-inducing. I thought the basic idea of Bleak House was ingenious (the book centeres around a case that has been in court for generations), and the other books of Dickens I have picked up are wonderful, but I can't seem to sit down and finish another one yet.

I read a tale of two cities for an english class. I have been trying to read David Copperfield but i dunno, just havent really taken the time to finish it. I also just had to return it today. But I was liking it.

I've read tale of two cities and great expectations. I hated tale of two cities, but I really liked great expectations. I'd recommend great expectations if you're looking for a good dickens novel.

I would also recommend Great Expectations. It's the only Dickens novel I've read besides A Tale of Two Cities, but it was the favorite of one of my professors, and he has read far more than I have. Dickens isn't my favorite British author, but I did enjoy Great Expectations fairly well.

If you can manage to read the whole book Our Mutual Friend is really great.

I had great expectations for A Tale of Two Citys but while reading it I found myself having hard times.

I am of two minds about Charles Dickens. On one hand, he is one of the more accesible classic authors and his books are more enjoyable than many. But actually, I find that I tend to agree with his critics at the time: his books are serializations (by which I mean they have those qualities regardless of their original form) that strike me as simply being what people at the time wanted to read, not great literature.

The only writer that rivaled Dickens was Hardy.

Eh, giving people what they wanted to read doesn't make literature not great. Take Shakespeare. Highly revered as a superb playwright for centuries, his work is genius in its grasp of human emotions and the human mind and has wonderful plotlines, but at the same time he definately created characters, settings, and situations to please people. When you start to understand his archaic english, you realize he was actually quite crude at times to please his audience, but that doesn't take away from the greatness of his work.

Sure, Dickens wrote what people wanted to hear, but that aspect of his work (or the serializaion) doesn't remove his genius or heart. He was concerned with the exploitation of people that went on in his society and tried to expose some of it through his writing, often portraying a dark side of England many of the educated ignored or didn't see. I view him in the same way I view Shakespeare or O. Henry - a man who wrote popularized stories about what people wanted to hear, but didn't loose his genius because of it.

Puritan wrote:Eh, giving people what they wanted to read doesn't make literature not great. Take Shakespeare. Highly revered as a superb playwright for centuries, his work is genius in its grasp of human emotions and the human mind and has wonderful plotlines, but at the same time he definately created characters, settings, and situations to please people. When you start to understand his archaic english, you realize he was actually quite crude at times to please his audience, but that doesn't take away from the greatness of his work.

Sure, Dickens wrote what people wanted to hear, but that aspect of his work (or the serializaion) doesn't remove his genius or heart. He was concerned with the exploitation of people that went on in his society and tried to expose some of it through his writing, often portraying a dark side of England many of the educated ignored or didn't see. I view him in the same way I view Shakespeare or O. Henry - a man who wrote popularized stories about what people wanted to hear, but didn't lose his genius because of it.

I agree. I love Dickens and have read most of his books. His best works were Oliver Twist, Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield.

[quote="Scribs"]I had great expectations for A Tale of Two Citys but while reading it I found myself having hard times.[/quote

ROFL! Very nice pun there, Piloscribs!

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone. Oh, and I realised a mistake I made in my opening paragraph. I think the Count of Monte Cristo was written by Alexander Dumas, not victor Hugo.

Puritan wrote:Eh, giving people what they wanted to read doesn't make literature not great.

True. What I meant to say is that I feel what I have seen of his writing is only this. While I respect what he did in terms of pioneering fiction, all of his work that I have read strikes me as having equal literary quality with much of the literature that is churned out at this point and considered light reading for the masses. Though I suppose those writers could eventually be considered literary greats as well.

Puritan wrote:Take Shakespeare. Highly revered as a superb playwright for centuries, his work is genius in its grasp of human emotions and the human mind and has wonderful plotlines, but at the same time he definately created characters, settings, and situations to please people. When you start to understand his archaic english, you realize he was actually quite crude at times to please his audience, but that doesn't take away from the greatness of his work.

Actually, I feel the same way about Shakespeare. I can read his English fairly easily, and in all honesty I don't see the qualities that you mentioned. That leaves us with simplistic, violent plots and dirty jokes. This may be due to my mental composition, but I find his characters only average (though probably good for the time) with unrealistic thought processes.

In the end, I suppose this means we simply disagree. The only thing that I disagree with you on that is more objective than subjective is the quality of Shakespeare's plots, but I think it likely we will both agree it isn't worth extensive discussion.

Hmm. Then out of sheer curiosity, what would you consider as great classic literature? If you don't really like Shakespeare or Dickens I can't imagine you liking Chaucer (who I despised because he was really obscene), so do you like Robert Lewis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, or Herman Mellvile (pages and pages of insanely descriptive writing about hunting, slaughtering, and even looking at whales *shudder*)?

You seem to have picked up that I'm not terribly fond of most literature considered classic. I can't answer your question in full, because I'm not as well read as I should probably be. Let me see what I can come up with from the top of my head...

Joseph Conrad. I didn't particularly enjoy Heart of Darkness but I was able to appreciate many aspects of it. Some of Conrad's quotes regarding the book also convince me that the praise many give it for its complexity is not merely overanalysis.

If Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) and Aldous Huxley count, I like their books as well. Of Alexandre Dumas, I have only read The Three Musketeers, but at the time I found it moderately enjoyable reading (that was in sixth grade). No one else is leaping to mind.

Of the authors you listed, I wasn't fond of Herman Mellvile (yes, I really couldn't care less about whale species), I haven't read enough to have a decent opinion of Robert Lewis Stevenson, and I've read nothing of Daniel Defoe.