My Daughter wanted to read Pickwick Papers tonight.

I hadn't read them before. My old encyclopedia set has summaries of old classics, and I'd read that one, but this is much better. Dickens really fleshes out his characters and makes them real, even when they're extraordinarily silly.

I don't know if this is the book I'd recommend to a newcomer to Dickens, though. If I weren't a major league bookworm, my public school education wouldn't have prepared me for his vocabulary.

But I have to take the truck in for an oil change at 7:00 tomorrow morning and I can feel the wife looking daggers at me from upstairs.