“There’s no denying that Dickens’s embroidered, involved sentences make increasing demands on the modern reader. The enormous success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy shows that we still have an appetite for long, complicated stories. But Rowling’s and Larsson’s prose is built for speed. Unlike Dickens, there’s nothing there in the way of language to stop the rapid turning of pages.”