During the last year and a half, I read every Dickens book.

By brokenspring

Back in 2020 I was like, “Okay, I’ll spend 2021 reading Dickens.” Seemed simple enough—never really read him before, he’s super famous, and I didn’t think there were that many books. So I went and bought all of his books in the same Everyman’s Library edition. https://imgur.com/Syj135w Then I made a plan. I added up the page counts and got 11097 pages total. Divide by 365 and you get about 30.4 pages a day. “Totally doable,” right? Right? In the beginning it was. Then life happened, I moved countries, and my routine basically fell apart… but I still kept going. https://imgur.com/kMGW42e https://imgur.com/rdBtn4H https://imgur.com/mcOMEze And yesterday I finally finished. Anyway, what did I learn from all that: - A schedule sounds easy until you’re doing it every single day. 30 pages/day stops being “no problem” pretty fast. - 1800s English absolutely slows me down. I can understand it fine (even though some expressions are kinda hilarious now), but I’m way faster with modern English—and even faster in my own language. - I basically tore through the books I liked. Shocking, I know. - Chesterton’s intros are… weird, in a good way? They’re different from most intros I’ve read, but they’re nice to read after (re-)reading the novel. - Dickens was kind of consistently good overall. Out of all 16, I loved most of them more than I expected. - David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities are now genuinely among my favorite books ever. - The ones I liked a lot too: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, and Edwin Drood. - I also don’t really line up with a lot of critics—Bleak House did not work for me at all, and Hard Times wasn’t great either. Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend were enjoyable, just not “wow.” - His Christmas stuff is sooo boring. - And I really, really wish Edwin Drood was finished. I was having a good time with it. So yeah. It was a fun little challenge, but I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. Next up I’m thinking more contemporary books… but I already feel the pull back to the 1800s, so I’ll probably go back soon.