Can somebody who knows Dickens' oeuvre well separate his novels into easy, medium, and hard categories for me?
Thanks.
Nah
>>8005820
Literally all easy.
>>8005820
His works start off easy and go into medium then hard as his career progresses. Although it's not like late Dickens is too difficult to enjoy. His plots, the subtleties and ironies, and symolism, get more complex, but they can still be enjoyed as straightforward novels.
He hasn't written anything particularly difficult. His works tend to increase in narrative complexity and depth in chronological order, with a drop in complexity in the early 1850s, between the time he finished Bleak House and the moment he finished Hard Times.
Especially when it comes to late Dickens and how to read him, its best, I've found, to follow the advice of Vladimir Nabokov in a lecture on Bleak House,and to "read Dickens with the spine", rather than your lips, hands, brain, or heart, if that makes sense. He has a simplistic beauty to his prose which more than carries the long passages of description he's notorious for.
If you legitimately have trouble understanding anything he wrote, you're a pleb.
They're easy to read but boring, so the longer the novel the harder it will be to read it
if you have a working pair of eyes you can just sort them by length and that will be pretty much the same thing