Book 41: Bleak House by Charles Dickens
A buried secret, a slow ruin, and the kindness that survives both
The recommendation for this book comes from Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe. He maintains an insightful blog that you should review. The fact that he loves reading fiction makes us admire all his fintech brilliance even more.
Charles Dickens published Bleak House in twenty monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. He wrote it in the middle of his career, after David Copperfield and before Little Dorrit, at the point where his comic energy and his anger at social institutions came under his fullest control. It is the most tightly constructed of his novels, and the one most often named as his best.
