>>24824583
Ethan Hawke is one of the worst actors of all time

>>24824583
I honestly just haven't thought about him in awhile, I've had too much other stuff to read. I read Great Expectations in hs along with everyone else and I read A Christmas Carol as a child, that's about as far into him as I ever got. I should probably add him to my overall list at some point.

>>24824583
My favorite part of Great Expectations is when the blond pornstar pipped Pip’s pip

I think because /lit/ for one reason or another doesn’t care for 19th Century British novels unless they’re by women

his work is too simple, too frowsy, too bloated. he's good if you're a child, but ultimately it's sort of milquetoast. some people love him very much, both here and elsewhere. nothing wrong with that, it's a bit like comfort food, something you can rely on to be consistent and be written well above the modern average. dickens fans will take offense to this, but he's effectively his era's iteration of stephen king. immensely popular, prolific, trendsetting, but not exactly palatable for those with tastes which diverge from the norm.

I have zero interest in victorian literature

>>24824655
He’s more like his era’s iteration of breaking bad. Penny Dreadfuls were his eras iteration of King

I own all his books but have only read Christmas Carol (which I read every year), Oliver Twist and a Tale of Two Cities.
I think the issue with Dickens is how his style loses depth as the reader matures.

>>24824583
I'm going through all his novels in order right now, I'm currently on Barnaby Rudge. There's really no one like him, he screams "I'M MORALIZING" at you but the prose is so good that he can get away with it. I can directly track his plots becoming more mature and complex with time too, the improvements he made between Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop are huge and that's just the sort of thing I like to see when I do a deep dive on an author like this.
Sadly the average /lit/oid is dumber than the illiterate factory workers Dickens was writing for, so I'll be alone when I reach the top of this mountain. Still, I can't recommend trying Dickens strongly enough. If you tried him and fell off, it's probably because you didn't start with The Pickwick Papers. You can't really appreciate Dickens without understanding that his first novel was a light slapstick comedy and a massive overnight success. No matter how bleak certain points in his later works are, you're always reading the author of The Pickwick Papers.

>>24824655
>it's a bit like comfort food

>>24825997
>but the prose

This is pretty much the difference. If you take an analytical - structures and themes and plots approach, Dickens is bad, and you can't understand him. If you have an ear for language, then you just enjoy that. God tier prose, if inaccessible to ESLs and the web-broken illiterates

>>24824655
>t. One of the retarded "major graduates" who failed to understand the 7 first paragraphs of Bleak House

>>24825997
Holy based. Had opinions like the other anons itt growing up until, one day, I sat down to read him and was blown away by the tone, attention to detail, character complexity, social commentary and sentence structure. You are soulless if you cannot immediately recognize the merit of Dickens as an adult.

>>24825997
He’s subtle as a bag of hammers but we also live in a world where people can’t understand subtext so Dickens will be the most popular author when we use AI to change the final hurdle of his work - the prose - to something dumbed down and full of emojis.

Dickens is fine, but pretending that he's anything other than a long-winded caricaturist (and proto-socialist) is a flight of fancy.
People who invest a lot of time into something tend to want to rationalize the time they've spent.
If they struggle with a thing, they want others to have struggled in the same way, lest it embarrass them. These fellows are prone to fashioning some very interesting delusions as a result.
Dickens wasn't Shakespeare no matter how many posts are to the contrary are made on this anime forum. Don't you owe it to him not to lie? To let him rest on his actual talents, to love him for what he is, is respect.