Yesterday I finished a reread of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, which I hadn't read for a few years. It's the last novel he completed, before the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Our Mutual Friend is quite good, although it certainly doesn't rank up there with the classics like Bleak House or David Copperfield. The end comes together awfully clumsily, even by Dickensian standards. There's a lot of social commentary, which we'd expected in a Dickens novel, but it's very pointed here; plus, it gave us the word Podsnappery (which probably alone justifies its writing). One of the things that always jumps out at me in reading Our Mutual Friend is the character of Mr. Riah, a remarkably kind and sympathetic Jewish character (it's believed that he was a makeup for Dickens's earlier characterization of Fagin in Oliver Twist). Highly recommended, naturally.
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