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This barely seems like a novel at this point; it's largely an exercise in Dickens making up funny little characters with which to populate London. This is for the best. Dickens is very good at coming up with odd fellows and situating them in this world of inscrutable signs where nobody understands each other in a foggy metropolis wrought by murk and paucity, while the story's central romance is a flat-out snoozefest

Page 50: a private eye's work keeps interfering with his romance of a small-time lounge singer. Milwaukee has been hit hard by the Depression.

Page 250: a band of psychic motorcyclists have conscripted a Croatian golem to do battle with Nazi vampires. The "Al Capone of Cheese" is wanted by several European spy networks.

Molloy is one of the most realistic novels ever written, if you smell awful, are completely hideous, disobey or fail to grasp every social custom, talk at length about completely irrelevant issues while failing to grasp anything about your current state, and repeatedly get into situations or dress yourself in symbols beyond your comprehension. This is how I show up to work most days as luck would have it

Chapter five of this book is one of the most upsetting things I have ever read. Like staring into a festering gash (complimentary). Krasznahorkai's prose (rendered in English by George Szirtes) demands such close scrutiny to discern the separation of its phrases and clauses & spends so much time rendering coherent the minutest deeds of the townsfolk, bored and enervated into cruelty, that *that* caught me off-guard

Robert Caro loves describing quaint New York neighbourhoods in such depth that I've lost sense of the story's grand thrust to stay with the residents of East Tremont or Sunset Park and sympathise about the cost of their groceries, and then saying "Robert Moses so hated these poors, he evicted thousands of them to build the $90,000,000 Bridge Which Solves The Traffic Problem, which made the traffic problem worse"