i hear you. Dickens is cool. for example parts of Bleak House are quite brilliant when you consider the context, the mood, emotions and in particular the fears of his audience at the time. but fuck me, does that book drag. it's not exactly a sagacious thing to say, yet i don't feel age would change my disposition toward the slower, laborious, parts of his writing there. i mean i get why they're there... sort of. but seriously.

i can even like the Brontë sisters.

i'm good with the Victorian Era more for the poetry, though. Tennyson, aforementioned, and either EBB or R Browning -- where i thrive. more or less.

idk i have a lot to read. lol. probably shouldn't even be online.

p.s. i think it's a toss up whether JJ would have said Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses was his best work. wasn't the latter unfinished? i remember reading something about this years ago -- it's where i got his phrase breaking the etym; an analog for 'splitting the atom'.

i tried to read Ulysses when i was 15 and almost immediately gave up.

Charles Dickens mostly was writing his books in the form of serials. They were wordy so that they'd continue on for many editions of these literary magazines of the era. He really was writing pulp fiction, though, and while he had a great mind for stories, as an author, he probably compares more to Stephen King than any other contemporary. He was popular, productive and not particularly relevant for the way he constructed sentences.

serialization was the thing, back then. i single out Bleak House because i find it more sluggish than his usual writing. he isn't my favourite; ever since i was 11 and coerced into reading Great Expectations which was not Harry Potter, y'know.

Dickens was (in)famously paid by the word for his work, so as Certain noted he would purposely be as verbose and descriptive as possible. Which, ironically, and this is all my opinion of course, led to him being considered as brilliant as he is. He went off on intricately detailed descriptions of things to simply fill up more page, and as a result his work is open to greater interpretation. I agree with you Certain though, he and Fitzgerald occupy that same space. King is underrated as literature too, imo.

well, Alexander Pope would have been proud of him, at least.

But literary scholars, the types who adore James Joyce, don't care for Charles Dickens.

I've never read anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I'm not interested, really. There are so many authors out there.

I agree, to an extent - I think there are probably equal amounts if not more who appreciate both. But there is definitely a brand of people that fit that description.

Agreed though, there are way more books I'm more interested in reading right now. Last couple years I've been reading a lot of nonfiction, more than I ever did in college at least. I try to bounce between fiction and nonfiction.

If you started today reading one highly regarded book a week, you could live until you were 500 and still not have cracked halfway through the list. It's pretty absurd how many well-regarded books (novels, plays, story collections, essay collections, memoirs, nonfiction narratives, etc.) there are.

No joke. Especially since people are still churning out brilliant work. I'm a huge Salman Rushdie fan. If you haven't read Midnight's Children, it's staggering. Also recently read Tenth of December by George Saunders, which contained a couple of phenomenal short stories, among the best I've ever read. Don't get me started man, I have no avenue to nerd out on literature anymore.


edit: are you on goodreads?

I liked Verne, but I can't read that kinda stuff much ne more

Postmodern lit

Pallahnuik
Vonnagut
Attwood

Ulysses is the one work which I have never been able to finish.

It mocks me bc picard brought it with him for light reading when he went on vacation to Riza.

I have to program a microprocessor to blink an LED 10 times when a button is pressed, and adjust a servo motor 's position according to the total number of blinks.