Author: Toni Morrison
First published: 1987, by Alfred A. Knopf

Sixty million, and more.

It’s very difficult for me to write about this novel, for what can one say about something that renders horror so beautifully? Any words I might conjure up about Beloved can only stand weakly in the shadow of its awesome power.

But I’ll try.

Beloved is the story of Sethe, a former slave from a plantation in Kentucky, now living in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1873. It’s the story of her lonely daughter Denver, who was born in a leaking boat during Sethe’s escape. And it’s the story of Beloved, Sethe’s other daughter, who has “returned” to the house at 124 Bluestone Road, eighteen years after her violent and bloody death. Ultimately Beloved is a gorgeous, luxurious, hideous account of American slavery and its enduring effects.

It’s no mystery as to what makes this story so “beautiful”—it’s the language. Toni Morrison’s language creates a richly textured, sensual world, even as it describes unimaginable events and situations from one of the darkest periods of our history. As one friend of mine says, “When I read Beloved, I feel like I’m being simultaneously soothed and beaten.” That’s exactly it . . . an effect achieved in no other novel I know. And aside from the artistry, it is a textbook, a history lesson. Morrison’s gift to us, in the most stunning prose, is a visceral and beautifully crafted account of America’s ugliest moment.

Paul D did not answer because she didn’t expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight copper dirt, moon—everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother—a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.

Photo credit: Audrey Staples

Author:

When Marian Evans began writing The Mill on the Floss during the first few months of 1859, the world did not yet know her as the famously cerebral George Eliot. Up until around June of that year, Evans was “in the closet,” as it were, hiding behind a male pseudonym, and private supporters like her agent/lover, George Henry Lewes, and her devoted Scottish publisher, John Blackwood. (Dickens, incidentally, was also an early supporter, and one of the few who knew about Eliot’s true identity early on.) Eliot’s “incognito,” as she called it, was a complicating factor in her rise to fame, for if the public found out that a woman had written her popular books (and even worse, a woman who was living, unmarried, with another married man), would readers boycott her works? Would libraries? Would other publishers? And would the gossip of the literati ruin what was promising to be an extremely lucrative career? These questions plagued Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and the publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons right up until the 1860 release—and enormous success—of Eliot’s third triumphant novel.

The Mill on the Floss is the story of Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom, of a family in ruin, of gossip and heartbreak, of sexual impulse, and of a world without real choices for women. Well, that last bit might be heavy-handed and over-simplified, but for Maggie at least, there do not seem to be any “good” choices, and that is what is so heartbreaking about her story. Nearly every choice she makes is met with some sort of condemnation, despite her good intentions, though of course Eliot’s subtlety of language often makes it difficult to interpret intentionality with any real certainty. But we love Maggie and we side with her. She is the classic heroine whom we want to embrace, comfort, and congratulate. Unfortunately, however, the sinister nature of this novel makes it impossible to dole out congratulatory remarks. It is a novel about how making a simple choice between left or right can change the course of one’s life forever. There is something deeply sinister in that, something deeply disturbing. Despite that idea, I do still “love” this book, but I can only do so with a great deal of caution.

Perhaps Eliot’s own anxieties around choice—as strong as the currents of the River Floss itself—made their way into this novel too easily. Whatever the case, Maggie’s fate in the literary marketplace, as well as Eliot’s own coming out, proved anything but tragic. Less than two months after the publication of The Mill on the Floss, Blackwood had sold all 6,000 copies of the initial run, with a plan to print an additional 500 copies before the end of May 1860. “This is highly satisfactory,” he wrote to Eliot with his characteristic grace. (Indeed, two months later, John Blackwood’s brother, William Blackwood, told Lewes that “more than 6,000 copies of a guinea and a half novel sold is a success which I am pretty confident has not been attained since the days of [Sir Walter Scott’s] Waverley Novels.” That was a very big deal, since after Dickens, Scott was the benchmark for superstardom.) By the end of that year, Eliot had received a total of £3,550 for Mill from Blackwood, and in addition to those profits, Lewes’s expert negotiations had brought in even more money from American and European publishers. (Her income for Mill during that first year alone wound up totaling £3,985.) It was not a bad year for a woman who was rejected as scandalous by nearly every social circle in Victorian London, and simultaneously praised as one of the greatest writers of her day.

Photo credit: Gary Simmons

Author: Robert Penn Warren
First published: 1946, by Harcourt, Brace, and Company

WARNING: Plot spoiler

This book might just deserve the recognition of being considered one of the greatest novels ever written. It is a masterpiece in every way—masterful in its style, execution, breadth, depth, “realism,” and even plot—conceived and bequeathed to us in the form of a novel by one of America’s master poets. It is a historical novel, not just in the sense of its having taken place in the past, but in the sense that one feels like one is living history—both grand, sweeping history, as well as intimate, personal history—when one is reading it.

All the King’s Men was famously inspired by the life of Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long, though Robert Penn Warren was clear in his assertion that he did not consider his fictional creation and the real-life governor one and the same. The story follows the political rise of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer turned powerful demagogue whose oratorical skills earn him the love of the people. His administration, however, is notoriously corrupt—blackmail and bribery are the common business of the day—and the machine runs along, in part smoothly oiled by one Jack Burden, the narrator of the story and the man who digs up the dirt on Willie’s opponents. It is a brilliant move on Warren’s part to have Willie’s “shadow” narrate this book. Jack is privy to more information than any other character—he’s the thread that binds them all together—and the effect is one of virtual omniscience, even when Jack Burden isn’t or couldn’t have been present. He is also, more formally, a student of history, though he literally walks out on his Ph.D dissertation one day, and never files for his degree.

The writing is nothing short of magnificent, the language sultry and delicious.

But the Millet place wasn’t like the hospital. It didn’t look at all like a hospital, I discovered when I turned off the highway twenty-five miles out of the city and tooled gently up the drive under the magnificent groining of the century-old live oaks whose boughs met above the avenue and dripped stalactites of moss to make a green, aqueous gloom like a cavern. Between the regularly spaced oaks stood pedestals on which classical marbles—draped and undraped, male and female, stained by weathers and leaf acid and encroaching lichen, looking as though they had, in fact, sprouted dully out of the clinging black-green humus below them—stared out at the passer-by with the faintly pained, heavy, incurious unamazement of cattle. The gaze of those marble eyes must have been the first stage in the treatment the neurotic got when he came out to the sanitorium. It must have been like smearing a cool unguent of time on the hot pustule and dry itch of the soul.

That excerpt partially describes the entrance to the Millet Sanitorium, where Sadie Burke has sent herself to recuperate after everything has gone down. It is emblematic of the power of Warren’s language; his words ooze the inevitable slow pace of time, the towering power of history and its many muscular branches. It is poetry describing everyone’s march towards death—the poetry of history, by which we resurrect things.

In the end, this long, gorgeous poem is really a tragedy. The stage is covered with bloody bodies by its conclusion, discoveries are made, lives are ruined, babies are born into new lives already ruined by the past. The stories (for really, there are many) gallop toward their horrible end points all along, but after Judge Irwin’s suicide, the words transport characters in an avalanche toward their doom. Something changes at that point; text and characters unravel. There is no other way—people will pay for history, their own as well as others’. Mrs. Burden is the one who sums it all up so nicely at the end, in a pronouncement that’s deceptively simple.

“I couldn’t,” she said. “Because everything was a mess. Everything had always been a mess.” Her hands twisted and tore the handkerchief she held before her at the level of her waist. “Oh, Jack,” she cried out, “it had always been a mess.”

Author: Wilkie Collins
First Published: 1859-60, in All the Year Round

The below is adapted  from an essay I wrote for The Guardian UK online.

Often singled out as the foundation text of “sensation fiction”—a genre distinguished by its electrifying, suspenseful, and sometimes horrific plots, as well as its unsavoury themes of intrigue, jealousy, murder, adultery, and the like—The Woman in White was an immediate sensation in its own right when it began appearing in Dickens’s weekly journal All the Year Round. Margaret Oliphant hailed it as “a new beginning in fiction”, while at the same time Edward Bulwer-Lytton dismissed it as “great trash.” And while Henry James disliked the “ponderosity” of The Woman in White (calling it “a kind of 19th-century version of Clarissa Harlowe”), he acknowledged that the book had “introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.”

Despite such drastically mixed reviews, The Woman in White was a mad success with the public, and made no less of a sensation out of its 35-year-old author, Wilkie Collins. In middle-class dining rooms everywhere, discussion turned to the intriguing cast of characters Mr. Collins had invented—mannish, eloquent Marian Halcombe; faithful and angelic Laura Fairlie; sinister, secretive Percival Glyde; and of course Count Fosco, seductive and cunning, with his cockatoo, his canary-birds, and his white mice running over his immense body. Two months in, Dickens was calling the novel “masterly”, and Prince Albert admired it so much that he later sent off copies as gifts.

During its serialisation in All the Year Round (from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860), and upon its publication in book form, The Woman in White inspired not only a series of imitators (chief among them Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne [1861] and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [1862]), but also what John Sutherland has described as a “sales mania and a franchise boom.” Manufacturers produced Woman in White perfume, Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, and music-shops displayed Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles. The poet Edward FitzGerald named his herring-lugger “Marian Halcombe”; cats were named Fosco and thought to look more sinister; and Walter became a fashionable name for babies. As Kenneth Robinson, one of Collins’s earliest biographers, pointed out, “even Dickens had not known such incidental publicity.”

Collins’s storytelling talents were utterly mesmerising for Victorian readers—and they are no less captivating for readers today. He was the master of the “cliff-hanger,” and given the 40 or so of them that strategically punctuate The Woman in White, it’s not difficult to see why this Victorian novel continues to thrill us. Our flesh creeps when Anne Catherick places her hand on Walter’s shoulder; our hearts ache when Marian Halcombe falls ill and Count Fosco violates her diary; our blood curdles when Walter Hartright stands next to his beloved’s tombstone, only to look up and find her standing there. The apparitions that Collins conjures are the ghosts that ensured not just his success but his longevity. They are what have kept readers going back for more during the last 150 years, and they bear testament to the value of Collins’s self-professed, “old-fashioned” opinion that “the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story …”

Author: Bram Stoker
First Published: 1897, by Archibald Constable and Co.

“Denn die Todten reiten Schnell” —
(“For the dead travel fast.”)

I love the opening chapter of Dracula—it’s like walking with someone through their own dark dream that they may or may not be remembering correctly. Jonathan Harker is travelling through a grim region in the Carpathian mountains (modern-day Romania), and from the start, you know that something is off about this place. The people are as nervous and superstitious as they come, foisting crucifixes upon the unwary traveller, whose life and soul they feel are in great jeopardy. Their terror becomes our terror, though we don’t yet know what it’s about. It’s the lack-of-knowing, on top of all the strange behavior, that makes the place so frightening.

The chapter takes us slowly through the Carpathians, revealing nothing but more darkness as we follow carriages and packs of wolves toward the looming Castle Dracula. Stoker’s lush writing infuses horror into the very landscape, providing beautiful descriptions that are as seductive as they are eerie and claustrophobic.

As we wound our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower behind us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This was emphasized by the fact that the snowy mountain-top still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and there we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me. For instance, hay-ricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves.

Again, something is just not right here—there are hay-ricks (hay stacks) in the trees, and the people have goitre (a swollen thyroid condition); but it’s a gorgeous, if sinister, place to be held captive, and Jonathan, like us, will soon find himself simultaneously entranced and terrified by vampires.

The rest of the book—the story really—is of course marvellous, though it’s ridiculous that four able-bodied men and a houseful of servants can’t seem to keep a bouquet of garlic in Lucy Westenra’s room, or ensure that her windows remain closed through the night. But despite unlikely and humorous foibles like these, reading the novel Dracula is a hypnotic experience, and there is a reason why this book, with its countless adaptations and offshoots, refuses to “die.”

Author: Charles Dickens
First published: 1849-50, by Bradbury and Evans

WARNING: Plot spoiler

The year before he died, Dickens called this novel “his favorite child.” While it is not exactly mine, I can see why it was his. In David Copperfield, Dickens created some of the most memorable—if not the most memorable—characters in his entire career. Even Virginia Woolf, who had no great deal of admiration for Dickens, admitted that David Copperfield was a novel so memorable and influential, that the story and characters had become part of most peoples’ consciousness from the days before they could even read.

The full banquet of Dickensian characters is present here in fine form, and you cannot help but love them. It’s one of the reasons why David Copperfield, in conjunction with Great Expectations, is sometimes the novel I tell people to read if they’ve never read Dickens before. You meet some of Dickens’s most likable and hilarious characters: Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Clara Pegotty and her brother, Mr. Dick (“Have him measured for a suit of clothes directly”), the “volatile” Miss Mowcher, Mrs. Micawber, and of course, Mr. Wilkins Micawber. You also encounter some of Dickens’s darkest and unlikable creations: Rosa Dartle, Mr. and Mrs. Murdstone, James Steerforth, and the unctuous Uriah Heep and his mother, who hang “like two great bats” over the whole of the Wickfield house.

Dickens has been criticized through the years, and often rightly so, for developing “flat” (as opposed to “round”) characters. These distinctions were first put forth by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel. In that work, Forster uses Mrs. Micawber as the paradigmatic example of what a flat character is:

The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” There is Mrs. Micawber—she says she won’t desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn’t, and there she is.

Touché Mr. Forster! He’s right—and there she is—but we’ll take more of her and her kind any day.

There are also those characters—and certainly moments—in this novel that tend towards the round. Though I find the Victorian “angel of the house” ideology in David Copperfield nauseating at times, I think Dickens treats two scenes in particular with incredible skill and emotional poignancy. The first is the discovery of Emily’s elopement with Steerforth (Chapter 31, “A Greater Loss”), and the second is the death of Dora Copperfield (Chapter 53, “Another Retrospect”). In both of these scenes, which have the potential to become un-retractable train wrecks of sentimentality and melodrama, Dickens renders the emotional turbulence that informs these moments with great respect and tranquillity—almost reservation, as if these tragic occurrences were no less a part of the natural fabric of life than Mr. Micawber’s insolvency. Mr. Pegotty’s heartbreak is palpable; and Dora Copperfield’s apologies are enough to make any reader reflect on lifetimes filled with regret. Here then is the artist toiling away at his craft, proving that this most sentimental and melodramatic of writers was also a supreme journalist who chronicled with exactitude the nuances of the human heart.

Author: Edith Wharton
First Published: 1920, in the Pictorial Review

The first chapter of the Age of Innocence is one of those magical first chapters that contains the entirety of the book within it. In fact, it holds a single sentence that contains the entire book:

He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.

For that is nearly everything that this book is about: Newland Archer’s insufferable dawdling, his dilettantism, the dilettantism of everyone around him, the constant delay of his own pleasures, and satisfactions never to come.

It is one of the most heartbreaking stories ever told.

Wharton presents an archaeological inventory of the Old New York Society into which she was born. It’s the early 1870’s, a time when everything—and everyone—has an exact and prescribed seat at the lavish dinner table of social custom. The relentless detail of Wharton’s novel produces more than just gorgeous prose; it constructs the fine bars of Newland Archer’s gold and crystalline cage. Every item, every word, every mood, every temperature is an essential part of the magnificent social structure that shackles him in velvet chains from which he can never escape.

You can open The Age of Innocence, point to any random paragraph, and immediately find evidence of this delicate, filigreed ironwork. The details and descriptions of Newland Archer’s world are Wharton’s foundation, walls, and ceiling. But there is one paragraph in particular that linguistically unites all of the themes of this great book—the imprisoning details, the social imperatives, the unconquerable addiction to those imperatives, the pain of a life suppressed:

There was something about the luxury of the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so charged with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into his system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the others, made any less systematized and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. But now it was the Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood irresolute, half-way down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins.

This paragraph appears at the end of Chapter 21, after Archer has spotted Ellen Olenska on Granny Mingott’s pier. He plays the game that he so often plays with himself—the game whereby he delays his own pleasure. “If she doesn’t turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I’ll go back.” Of course, she doesn’t turn, and he does go back. It’s the same cowardly march to his own execution that he can’t help but repeat, over and over.

Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation of The Age of Innocence is my favorite book-to-screen movie of all time, not only because of its visual splendor, but because of its absolute fidelity to Wharton’s original text. It has been dismissed as slow and boring by many, but to me it is probably the greatest film adaptation ever done of one of the greatest novels ever written.

Author: Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell)
First Published: 1847, by Smith, Elder, and Co.

Poor Jane Eyre—the doormat of 19^th-century literature. Everyone walks all over her, and her mistreatment by other characters throughout the novel is both infuriating and disgusting. From the Reeds and Mr. Brocklehurst in childhood, to the Ingrams and even her beloved Mr. Rochester as an adult, the abuse heaped upon the heroine of this book is difficult to endure. I actually need to put the book down at certain times because I can only take so much of Jane’s undeserved punishments at once.

But beyond that horrible aspect of the book—which, I must own up, is as artful as it is disturbing—there is so much to love about Jane Eyre. One of the things I love most about Jane Eyre herself is that she is one of literature’s great readers (even though she often disavows this). At ten years old we know that she has already devoured Bewick’s History of British Birds, Goldsmith’s History of Rome, The Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, and no doubt countless other unnamed books. Little Jane has read widely and with great feeling, and her reading has made her “passionate.”

And then there is the language—Brontë’s magnificent, dream-like language. Her imagery is as relentless as it is gorgeous, and I think I might be right in saying that her prodigious vocabulary surpasses that of any other Victorian writer (even Dickens). Here are but a few examples:

. . . it was the hebdomadal treat to which we all looked forward from Sabbath to Sabbath. (Chapter 7)

. . . the heavy supper she had eaten produced a soporific effect. (Chapter 10)

. . . she proceeded to arrange the cups, spoons, &c., with assiduous celerity. (Chapter 13)

To so practiced and indefatigable a horseman as Mr. Rochester it would be but a morning’s ride. (Chapter 22)

. . . you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. (Chapter 27)

The water stood in my eyes . . . but I would not be lachrymose . . . (Chapter 37)

And who but Charlotte Brontë could ever describe a wedding dress like this?

It was enough that in yonder closet, opposite my dressing-table, garments said to be [Mrs. Rochester’s] had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock and straw bonnet: for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment; the pearl coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau.  I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o’clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment.

Jane Eyre is a feast of words. And it is no wonder Virginia Woolf said that we read Charlotte Brontë not for her characters, not for her comedy, and not for her philosophic view of life, but simply “for her poetry.”

Author: Truman Capote
First Published: 1965, in The New Yorker

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of Western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”

So begins, beautifully, Truman Capote’s meticulously-researched masterpiece about the brutal 1959 murder of the Clutter family in their home, and the pursuit and execution of their killers. It’s hard for us today to imagine airport news stands devoid of true-crime books with their glossy black covers and embossed, bright red lettering, but before In Cold Blood, the modern true crime story as we know it had yet to be born. Literary accounts of crimes and criminals had always been popular with readers, going all the way back to the Newgate novels of the early 19th-century, and even earlier with such “rogue” novels as Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. But In Cold Blood inaugurated what Capote himself called the “nonfiction novel”—a genre of writing that told the “truth” with the artistry and devices of the traditional realist novel. When you read the book, you step into another densely atmospheric and psychological world, chiefly because Capote’s journalism skills walk arm in arm with his creative powers as a novelist.

The story came to Capote’s attention one day when he read a 300-word, one-column article in the back of the New York Times:

Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI)—A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged. The father, 48-year-old Herbert W. Clutter, was found in the basement with his son, Kenyon, 15. His wife Bonnie, 45, and a daughter, Nancy, 16, were in their beds. There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut . . .

Capote immediately traveled to Kansas (escorted by his childhood friend Harper Lee) to investigate the story. The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were captured shortly afterwards, and Capote spent the next six years researching and writing the “novel.” The book has been rightly hailed as the author’s greatest achievement.

I have talked about incredible openings before (García Márquez and Shirley Jackson), but with Capote, it’s the ending that never leaves me. The closing scene of In Cold Blood takes place in the cemetery where the graves of all four Clutters are “gathered under a single gray stone.” Al Dewey, the lead investigator who apprehended Smith and Hickock, meets Nancy Clutter’s high school friend, Sue Kidwell, at the gravesite. After a noticeably unemotional conversation about college plans and boys, Sue trots off, seemingly late for something undisclosed.

“And nice to have seen you, Sue. Good luck,” he called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging, shining—just such a young woman as Nancy might have been. Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.

Author: Charles Dickens
First Published: 1860-61, in All the Year Round

The two questions about Dickens that people most often ask me are “What is your favorite Dickens novel?” and “If I’ve never read a Dickens novel before, which one should I start with?” My answer to both is usually Great Expectations, though that answer tends to differ sometimes, depending on which day you ask me.

Written at the height of Dickens’s creative powers in 1861, Great Expectations contains all of the best in Dickens: hysterical and eccentric characters, painful, moving, and unforgettable episodes, love unspoiled and love unrequited, and most important of all, an incredible story. John Irving, another one of my heroes, has gone so far as to say that Great Expectations “has the most wonderful and perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language.” I think I have to agree with him, though if you pressed me to declare my favorite novel in the English language, Great Expectations might have to duke it out with Middlemarch.

Not only does Great Expectations contain my favorite story by Dickens, but it also contains my favorite paragraph in all of Dickens. Here it is:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

The wisdom and the feeling of these words take my breath away every time I read this passage. Dickens is referring here to the day that Pip meets Estella—the day that forever changes his life and sets his expectations in motion. But take any day from your own life that holds special significance, good or bad, then extract it, and extrapolate on what would have happened for the rest of your life instead. The concept is really mind-boggling.

It is a shame that so many people form a bad opinion about this novel and about Dickens in general when they’re forced to read Great Expectations in high school—a time when people are often too distracted, rightfully, by adolescence to weather the book’s various demands. One of the great joys of Great Expectations though, is being able to rediscover it whenever you want. When you re-read Great Expectations as an adult, it’s a very different experience from plodding through that intimidating 400-pager that your teacher might have assigned to you in high school. And if you wait long enough to let your heart get broken once or twice, I can tell you that Great Expectations will speak to you with a power that no other book can claim.