The problem with reading Dickens is he insists on shoving dozens & dozens of new characters and random plot movements down our throats, which is frustrating now but I guess made sense back then, when most of his books were released one chapter at a time every month. So it occurs to me now that reading a Dickens novel in its day was like watching a tv show before streaming: we'd have an entire week to mull an episode over & over and very slowly get to know new characters, exactly as people used to consume Dickens (albeit by the month, not week), while reading Dickens today is like streaming a show as in you're binging everything wholesale and a lot of it all blurs together, surely to be forgotten before the next binge even begins.
XMASTIME NOTE: apparently I made a very similar note about Dickens and how we watch tv today while trying to read Bleak House:
395???!?! This is the 2022 equivalent of someone bugging you to watch a streaming series that "sucks and is boring but if you hang n there until Episode 9 it'll be worth it" oh fuck that shit, people.
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