Dickens, Charles. Bleak House (1853). New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Imagine reading one book for an average of three hours a night, every day for about two weeks. And imagine reading it fast, skipping over a lot of the detail to get to the action. This is how much reading I put into Bleak House, and rather than complain, I'm lamenting that most novels—particularly ones of the twenty-first century—don't allow for such a reading experience. Can't. Can't compete with the hundreds of thousands of characters that Dickens seems to throw at you.

It's important, to me at least, because it's great to know that novels can do this. It'd be hard to write a novel with three or four central characters after reading Dickens. Yes, there are great novels with three or four central characters in them, and pretty much all those novels are contemporary ones. A Dickens novel todaywould never sell. It's kind of sad, but there's always Dickens to go to when one wants Dickens.

This is my first time, so you'll forgive my giddy horniness about the man.

To give you a sense of why he's so good, here's just the second paragraph of the novel (on page 3 of 861), which has more life and complexity in it than all the stories I've written put together:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits [sic] and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of chipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.*

How many times have I learned the lesson that all good writing is is a pretty string of precise nouns and how many times will I have to relearn it?

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* It occurs to me that the past couple quoted passages have all been about unforgiving weather in European cities. Clearly, this is the way to go if you want accolades. Writers, commence.