Unless I'm forgetting something, it's been a while since the club read a classic. The last I can recall was The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, and before that I can only recall the Checkhov short stories and The Age of Innocence.

If the group has a hankering to read another classic, I might suggest Great Expectations. Somehow I'd never gotten around to reading it and just started listening to it on audiobook. Not surprisingly, Dickens writes some awfully clever and entertaining prose and dialect. Even if many members have read it, it's likely a long time has elapsed and it might almost seem like reading it for the first time.

PUBLISHERS DESCRIPTION: Pip is a poor orphan, a boy with “no expectations” being raised by his unkind sister and her husband in a small home on the marshes of Kent. But when Pip meets the bizarre Miss Havisham and her beautiful ward, Estella, he starts to yearn for a life as a gentleman. However, Pip will discover that wealth and honesty do not go hand in hand, and that kindness can be found in the most surprising places. A love story, a mystery, and a sharp critique of upper-class English society, Great Expectations remains one of Dickens’s best-regarded works.