A review by milesjmoran
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
5.0
He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too; it was so shattered and ruined.
Bleak House is a bit of a beast, weighing in at over 900 pages, dense with a multitude of characters, plot, and some of the most intricate prose I've ever read. While Little Dorrit remains my favourite Dickens thus far, I completely understand why it is widely regarded as his best work.
I would hesitate to call this a difficult book, though I would concede that it can be quite an intense reading experience, as you are constantly unearthing new details and being introduced to a new character every other page it feels like. It took me a good few chapters to get comfortable with the volume of information but even then I would sometimes have to double check who everyone was and I couldn't let my attention drift for a moment without risking losing track of the plot entirely. Regardless, I absolutely loved this book - it's gloriously funny but also unbearably tragic as well, and I look forward to reading it again in the future...not for a good long while though....it's very long.
Bleak House is a bit of a beast, weighing in at over 900 pages, dense with a multitude of characters, plot, and some of the most intricate prose I've ever read. While Little Dorrit remains my favourite Dickens thus far, I completely understand why it is widely regarded as his best work.
I would hesitate to call this a difficult book, though I would concede that it can be quite an intense reading experience, as you are constantly unearthing new details and being introduced to a new character every other page it feels like. It took me a good few chapters to get comfortable with the volume of information but even then I would sometimes have to double check who everyone was and I couldn't let my attention drift for a moment without risking losing track of the plot entirely. Regardless, I absolutely loved this book - it's gloriously funny but also unbearably tragic as well, and I look forward to reading it again in the future...not for a good long while though....it's very long.