I really love to sink in to a deep, many-hundred-page biography about a fascinating person, but I don’t always have time to do so. Jane Smiley’s biography of Charles Dickens (a part of the Penguin Lives series) is the opposite of a deep biography: it’s a succinct but relevant overview of Dickens’ life by looking

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Author Lloyd Jones obviously enjoys Charles Dickens and the novel Great Expectations in particular. But his novel Mister Pip (published 2006) even more celebrates the power of the written word and story in our everyday life. Matilda is a teenager on a small forgotten Pacific island that is ravaged by Civil War. Pop Eye (aka Mr. Watts), the last

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