I just finished Our Mutual Friend and enjoyed it. It seemed perhaps a bit rushed at the end, but mostly it was good. Apart from To Be Read at Dusk (which I did not read at dusk), I haven't read Dickens in a very long time. I've never read Our Mutual Friend before. Now I've started Bleak House, which I don't think I've read either. I watched the Gillian Anderson version a few years back.

Anyhow, what are your Dickens recommendations? Non-gherkins or gherkin sock poppets are free to chime in with theirs.

David Copperfield
Great Expectations
A Tale of Two Cities

The best is David Copperfield. Well, not best, maybe, but my favorite. The best, considered as a literary work of art, might be Great Expectations, maybe, or Tale of Two Cities. But although I like his late, more "serious" stuff well enough, I like his early, silly stuff the best. Pickwick, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop are all great. Pickwick is completely nuts. It might be my second favorite. Nicholas Nickleby almost reads like an early attempt at writing David Copperfield. And the Old Curiosity Shop takes itself almost too seriously to be really good, but Quilp and Dick Swiveller make it all worthwhile.

My "read them in this order" list is

David Copperfield
Pickwick
The Old Curiosity Shop
Oliver Twist (the least good of his books, maybe, but quick and engaging and different from the epics elsewhere on the list)
Nicholas Nickleby
Great Expectations
Tale of Two Cities
...and then whatever else...

I thought Edmund Wells wrote those.

No, no, with two p's.

Rarnaby Budge?

I think you've killed the Dickens thread.

I'm really enjoying Bleak House. I'm glad I started reading some Dickens again. My favourite book from of old was A Tale of Two Cities, but, as I mentioned in the first post, I haven't read much by him in ages and haven't read all his work. I did read, and, afair, enjoyed David Copperfield, but just in a Norwegian translation, probably when I was in my teens. It must have been before I really started reading novels in English, but that was quite late. Not really before I went to university, I think. Must reread it in the original English Dutch soon.

I do remember starting The Pickwick Papers a few years ago, but not really getting into it. However, that could have been a matter of timing. Sometimes it's just not the right time for something you may enjoy at a different time.

I couldn't get into Pickwick either (srsly). Maybe it's better in the original Klingon.

It gets better. He didn't really know what he was doing with the story until he stumbled upon Sam Weller.

Considering David Cooperfield now after an interlude with Glenanaar by Canon Sheehan upon finishing Bleak House. I can't quite decide whether to read another book not by Dickens first though. And, if so, which book.

By Charles Dikkens?

Of course!

Reading The Adventures of Sally by Wodehouse. A bit of a change from both Dickens and Sheehan.

And from Dikkens.

I really liked David Copperfield. I don't think I can have read it all the way through the first time when I read it (or part of it) in Norwegian.

There ought to have been some sequel with Traddles giving the Murdstones a proper comeuppance through some legal proceeding.

I almost understood that.