It is so hard to get a post in on this forum, OMG.
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins.
A real page-turner and supposedly foundational to the mystery novel genre. I enjoyed it and loved a couple of the characters. There is the typical sappiness that is seemingly inherent to all 19th Century novels in which a romantic story unfolds (often involving an angelically beautiful, annoyingly innocent and not terribly bright young woman who's in the habit of fainting), but, perhaps due to the author being male, the sappiness is contained. Two characters not involved in the romance were brilliantly written, the spinster Marian and the charismatic villain, Count Fosco. I feel like they really exist somewhere.
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
Typical Dickensian wit and suspense, although it seems a bit more basic in comparison to Great Expectations and Bleak House, where his wit seems to have matured like fine wine. His descriptions of the poverty and squalor in Victorian-eran London however are as graphic and detailed as ever. I think Marx said Dicken's portrayals of society were a greater indictment of capitalism than any socialist theorist had ever written, or something like that. The book seems like a historical document in that sense.
1984, George Orwell
I figured why not, now that fascism is back in vogue. The movie of this book was shit and the book itself was hard to get into way back when, but I'm actually finding it really interesting this time around (still half-way through). In fact, there are things that have come true which still didn't exist at the turn ofthe century, like the versificator (a form of AI that writes songs for the proles) or the speakwrite, which is a speech-to-text device. I believe this was far from being Orwell's favorite book, but I find his reflections very poignant right now.
I also can't help wondering whether Orwell knew what was really going on in the Soviet Union, because so much of what he describes is textbook Stalinism (especially the false confessions and subsequent execution of the Old Guard of Bolsheviks). I can't remember when the world really began to find out about all this. I know Trotsky was writing about it until 1940 when he was killed, but did Orwell know? The Ministry of Truth is basically devoted to constantly altering historical records and documents of all kinds. It's exactly what happened under Stalinism - the past changing all the time. Names of revolutionaries in Lenin's writings were replaced to include pro-Stalinist Bolsheviks, rendering any publication by Lenin during Stalinism pretty much untrustworthy. There is also the erasure of Trotsky from famous photographs. I wonder how many people outside the USSR really knew this was happening at the time.
I brought back a lot of books from Ireland in English so I don't have to pay these ridiculous Amazon shipping fees. I'm pretty much set for this year.