The Pickwick Papers

I’ve struggled with reading as a grown-up. Some suspected neuro-spiciness means my concentration isn't too good. There's a phenomena I'm told is pretty common in which I'd read the same sentence again and again and not really take any of it in. Then I tried audiobooks (including Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities) and found that you can't really listen to the same sentence over and over, because the reader just keeps going. You have to pick up from context. Then I started treating books in the same way. Just keep going, and pick up from context.

When this approach started getting me through some real-life, honest-to-goodness books I never thought I'd end up reading this massive Dickens tome (a red-hot 900 pages of small print), but I got hooked on it pretty early. There's a little bit of historical context behind why that is. In the Victorian era (this is slightly pre-Victorian) books including lots of Dickens' work were published in serialised magazines. This for me is reminiscent more of a HBO series than a novel. Chapters start enticing and end exciting, because the next one might be a month away. The lack of filler-time helped keep me in I think.

The story follows Samuel Pickwick, chair of the Pickwick club of London, who sets off on a journey to have adventures with his friends, and report those adventures back to the club for their publication. It even sounds like a TV series pitch. They aren't on a quest, they're not after finding something in particular. They're just going about, meeting colourful and strange characters and getting into - and subsequently out of - various scrapes. This is a huge part of it's charm, there's no filler, it's just situation after situation. The charm and wit and often ridiculousness are reminiscent of Wodehouse for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It's a wonder that this is the same guy who wrote A Tale of Two Cities, a book full of sadness and anger and oppression. To say "You heard about this Dickens guy? He's real good." feels trite, but I'll definitely be checking out more of the myriad other genre-books he's written.