I have read all fourteen and a half Dickens novels.

Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) was the last Dickens novel I had not read, which means that I have now read them all.  Rather than write a post about this milestone, I will quietly celebrate on my own.

That took a lot less time than I had expected.  It was a little too quiet, if you know what I mean.  Guess I’ll write something.

I am never sure what people – by people I of course mean book bloggers – are really planning when they declare, after reading two novels, or maybe a novel-and-a-half, that they have fallen in love and will soon read “all” of an author’s work.  They should investigate the “all” a bit before making their empty declarations.  “All” can be pretty dire, even for a major writer.

Many years ago, I was the proud reader of all of Thomas Pynchon, not just the five published books but every published scrap of text uncovered by his lunatic bibliographers.  The highlight, from the completist’s point of view, was a short article published in a 1960 issue of Aerospace Safety magazine which had exactly one Pynchonian line, a joke about a flagman signaling “The plane ran over the general’s foot.”  Or so I remember.  Then Pynchon wrote the liner notes to a CD by a minor indie rock band called Lotion, and I thought forget it, I am not buying a goldang Lotion album in order to maintain my neurotic all-of-Pynchon status.  Now I have not even read all of his novels.  This is progress.

The “all” of Dickens is so enormous that it is unreasonable.  Fourteen and a half novels, check; five “Christmas Books,” check; the confusingly labeled “Christmas Stories,” at least half are still unread; and then there are travel books, and Sketches by Boz, and A Child’s History of England, just to stay with books that might be readable.  What to make of his plays, or his poems?  (Answer: nothing, ‘cause I’m not going to read them).  And all of that magazine and newspaper writing, masses of it.

The exciting thing about having read every Dickens novel is that I have completed a necessary step to re-reading not all but most of them.  Finally, some real reading!  It has been almost twenty years since I read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, so that one is tugging at me a bit, particularly since it is closely related to a plotline of Our Mutual Friend.  Been a while since Great Expectations, too, which prefigures OMF in interesting ways.  Bleak House I have read twice, but having read the rest in the series – with Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, it forms a thematic and artistic trilogy – I want to go back to it.  Dickens is often revising the previous novel in the current one.  It is nice to be able to line them all up in my head.

Himadri, the Argumentative Old Git, provided the encouragement to check off Charles Dickens Novel #14 now rather than later.  If I write something  - I was going to say “more” but I have deftly avoided the novel this time – about Our Mutual Friend, I will bounce some ideas off of his pieces.