I've never been able to warm to Dickens. I keep trying -- I pick up novel after novel --but there's something about his authorial interjections that sends me away again. I am thinking at the moment about my last attempt to read the Tale of Two Cities. I thought to myself (after he described a nobleman and a cleric), okay, you've made your point that you consider these folk despicable. Now could we please get along with the plot? He didn't, and I moved along to something else.