To be fair, Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie can be a slog. The tale of a young country girl, Caroline “Sister Carrie” Meeber, moving to the big city was published in 1900, at the tail end of the Victorian era, which was dominated by not just the novel, but by the epic novel. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair are touchstones of the time, and all three clock-in at over 500 pages — reflecting an era without television or radio, during which the serialized story was standard and fiction writers were often paid per word. Thus, it’s no surprise that Sister Carrie is a heavy 557 pages.
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