Hard Times by Charles Dickens

This Dickens' novel focuses on the hardships of the industrial movement in 19th century England. The characters are weavers, mill owners, the children of members of parliament, and an orphan girl of a troupe of traveling players. Some portions are overly melodramatic, in my humble opinion, but that's just Charles Dickens. It's still well worth a read.

Link to Amazon: Hard Times (Barnes & Noble Classics)

Drood by Dan Simmons

Before reading this book, you really need to read:

• The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens


• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (The semi-autobiographical novel)


• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins


• Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

That should be enough to get you started. The narrator of Drood is Wilkie Collins, the contemporary of Dickens who was his friend and collaborator. Collins also had a problem with laudanum (opium), a plot point that figures prominently in Moonstone and Simmons Drood.

Dicken's Drood was unfinished, of course, and this novel is an entertaining attempt to explain the unfinished mystery of Dickens' novel by assuming that it was based on actual people and events in Dickens' life.

Drood is also massive. The edition that I read weighs in at ~770 pages, a size and heft that would make Dickens' and Collins' proud. By the time you read all the prerequisites for Drood you will have finished off almost three thousand pages. But the reading is so much fun, it's worth it.

Link to Amazon: Drood: A Novel

Home by Marilynne Robinson

The best novel I have read in a long time. It's quiet and somber, reflective and perceptive, moving and thought-provoking. It's a retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son, with more depth and complexity than the original.

The novel deals with issues of morality and religion with sensitivity and understanding. This is a novel for thinking adults, for those with faith and without, for the hopeful and the hopeless.

Link to Amazon: Home: A Novel