[Kevin J MacLellan]

In answer to Mary MacLean:

As to Dickens, I recommend you go next to Dombey & Son --it is poignant and hysterically fun in its clever characterizations, in the way only Dickens can be -- and maybe then Hard Times. I say this in the hope that it will restore your faith, or at least bolster your trust, that this guy hs great things to offer and he does offer it in heaps. (Bleak House struck me as boring by comparison to his other works.) But none beats Oliver Twist in my book. (I wish I could have the 'Artful Dodger's courtroom tirade by heart!) Sorry, but I don't remember Nicholas Nickleby, if I ever read it.

Nabakov: You will love Pale Fire --I hope. I think it is far better and more representative of his remarkable talent than Lolita. PF starts with a very fine POEM of 999 lines - and we are free to wonder whether there should, or would?, have been a last [1,000th] line - and then proceeds to a fascinating story with the most lunatic of unreliable narrators. It was, at its time, considered experimental literature. It is almost universally applauded; but more interesting yet is the fact that there are actual camps or divergent schools of critics who disagree violently about the correct interpretation of everything from the meaning and role of the poem to the secret identity of the narrator! Amazing. I think it is sheer genius --and great fun, too.
Nabakov at his best!!

For my part, I am right now in the midst of a Henry James binge, having read six of his novels and novellas recently, and am about to dive into The Golden Bowl. These deep dives into one author's oeuvre are usually just recreational, but in this case I guess I am trying to discover the secret of his eventual descent into a deplorably labrynthine prose style (especially in his non-literary writings; the 1904 prefaces and other such) in the later phase of his career. (It has, this binge, then, something in common with Janice's challenging question. I am trying to fill in the lacunae in my own literary education.)
So much is written in defense of HJ's opacity that doesn't satisfy my sense that, all excuses and pretensions aside, he went from a superb master of eloquence to a frustratingly excruciating literary dandy.

Finally, the confession: I have to admit that Shakespeare's Histories and most of the Comedies are still on my to-do list. While I'm at it I should also admit that drama, as a genre, is mostly on my to-do list. I wish I could read for ten-twelve hours at a clip as I once did, but now cannot.
So much to do, and so little time, eh?

P.S. I just realized that I was cross-posted with Nemo. I can second his vote for Hard Times, so long as it leads to D&Son. It (Hard Times) is probably the most sober, and sobering, of D's novels that I know of.