1838
2 books
- You follow Oliver through a grim London of workhouses, thieves, and unlikely kindness, while Dickens balances sharp social anger with wonderfully strange comic figures like the Artful Dodger and Mr. Bumble. It can be melodramatic and uneven, but Nancy and Sikes give the story a genuinely painful human weight.
- Poe's only novel, and it's a strange one: what starts as a boy stowing away on a whaler slides into mutiny, starvation, and lots drawn among desperate men, then keeps getting weirder. If you like stories that end tidily, skip it; if you like a fever dream, go.