I just read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and I really enjoyed it! For some reason I never picked up Dickens because I figured it was only for literature snobs or English majors. A friend at work recommended that I check out this book after I had been recently enjoying Twain’s hilarious accounts of Tom and Huck’s adventures in nineteenth century America. If you search the Internet you’ll see plenty of comparisons between the two authors, and rightly so; they were contemporaries and they both wrote about every day life in their respective societies.

Great Expectations is about a young man, Pip, and his adventures around England. He doesn’t fake his own death or run away from home to live on an island and pretend to be a pirate, but the stories are interesting and there is no shortage of plot twists. I was constantly surprised by the subtle humor in language and descriptions of English society. I even found myself laughing out loud a few times. I never saw it coming, Dickens!

From what I can tell Dickens is a bit more “proper” than Twain, but I can see how people would relate the two. I plan on reading more of his stuff in the next few months, and I’ve already picked up a copy of David Copperfield. I’m hoping its as fun to read as this one was! So if you’ve been staying away from Dickens for some reason it’s time to rethink!