I read a book by Charles Dickens

I have started three books by Charles Dickens; A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times and Great Expectations. None of these books did I ever finish reading, though I have picked each of them up more than once. I always had something better to do than continue reading e.g. slamming my hand in a car door for fun. Last night, though, I finished reading Great Expectations, and to tell you the truth, I'm not that pleased with the fact that I did. You see, the story really ends up being a disappointment on a grand scale... 500+ pages of grand dissappointment.
Normally, once I have finished a book, I close it and begin to reflect on the journey of the story and simply reflect on what I have read. After 518 pages, I put this book down and immediately grabbed another one to keep from throwing something against a wall or out the window. What. a God. Damn. Waste. Of Time! If I ever again want to read a book by Dickens, I will first ask someone to read it before me and underline the passages that are beautifully written. This way I can just skip to them and then ask said person what happens in the story.
Dickens is a wonderful writer, I'm not gonna argue that, but the racket he dreamed up is even more genius than his turning of phrases. He builds such a world that you trudge through to see what the hell might happen at the end. The writing between his pretty phrases is mostly basic and he is constantly introducing different characters to distract you from the fact that he has a goal for his wordcount and little else, and! and! he purposely writes dialogue in accents and dialects that are difficult to deceipher just, it would seem, to slow you down. People hold Dickens in high esteem because of the number of characters he created, but these are the same suckers, some of 'em, who don't believe in religion. Those that wrote the Bible created a bunch of different characters too, you know! Big effing deal.
So as I read a more modern book with no dialects to figure out and about half the pages and twice the story, I am glad that I can now give away this book that weighed me down (mentally and physically) through my travels over the last month. Next time someone askes me about Dickens or suggests I read even a short story of his, I will come back with my, now well rehearsed, response that does not suggest anything about his ability to write the English language, just stories in the English language...

Dickens sucks!

- Patrick