Books and more books....

I was in Borders last week and managed to resist buying any books. That is probably a first for me, but I am trying to be mindful of the two shelves of books waiting to be read (that is forgetting of course all the books which have now been shelved elsewhere in the house, unread). However I was cheered up by a comment from AA Gill in Sunday times that everywhere else in the world, literate people have a list of books they have read, only the English (I am sure he meant British) have a list of books they haven't read. I resolve not to beat myself up for never having read anything Russian apart from Solzhenitsyn, not having read Proust, or Chaucer, or all the other worthies that I probably should have read and probably also never will.
However I am constantly surprised by the fact that worthy books are often better than we think they will be. A bookclub I used to belong to insisted on reading Dickens; the book selected was Bleak House (this was before the marvellous TV adaptation). I found myself 400 words in and still struggling to get interested, but then I could not put it down and the last 500 words fairly raced by. Fantastic.
I think it is a mistake to rely on TV adaptations to tell you about a book. I have seen at least three versions of Oliver Twist, but only the extended version at Christmas really gripped me, with all the extra characters and layers, and now I am determined to read the original.
Dickens breaks all the rules for writing. He relies on coincidence once too often, his nice characters are impossibly nice, especially given their backgrounds, but to be kind, he was writing pre Freud and perhaps did not know that a neglected and abused child is unlikely to grow up into an unselfish, brave and self sufficient citizen, but is highly likely to be a psychopath. His names are weird and wonderful, utterly unbelieveable, but entirely loveable. His characters are often larger than life, almost caricatures, and I wonder whether we could not learn from this as writers? Perhaps the best, most memorable characters are those who almost could not be real?