Just finished Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Actually quite an enjoyable read when you can go at your own pace versus having to do a book report on it tomorrow morning. Dickens was really a master at fleshing out believable characters, keeping the plot moving along (of course far slower than modern attention spans demand) and the occasional intellectual mini-essay. It's easy to see why he was such an enormously popular writer in his day. Political correctness has changed a bit though-one of his villains is almost always referred as The Jew.