I always try to avoid looking at the section where my books would be shelved, but I do know that my most reliable neighbor to the right is Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening', which is dispiriting. That's a book I don't want to re-read.
I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.
Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.
I studied English literature at university, but for some reason we only spent one week on [Charles] Dickens, so I remember just trying to find the shortest book that I could find. I was like, "'Hard Times,' really great - it's short, that'll do it."
I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.
I was brought up on Dickens. I remember reading 'Bleak House' but, coming back to it, I didn't remember much about it apart from a few characters.
I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She's quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is 'The House of Mirth.' I also like 'The Reef.'
I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.
I was into Virginia Woolf and James Joyce [at university] and I think we all thought that [Charles] Dickens wasn't that cool.
I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.
I've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
I've recently rediscovered Anthony Trollope. I used to read him back in college, and a friend turned me on to a whole new series of his work, 'The Palliser Series.' It's a series of seven or eight books.
I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.
When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.
Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
I've never finished anything by Dickens.
Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.
In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.
I was enamored with Charles Dickens as a kid, and his names blew me away.
I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.
I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.
