Ah, more distractions for the leisured class, a chance to take their minds off their tattered retirement funds. First, there is the "Masterpiece Theatre" molasses-paced "Little Dorrit," an adaptation of the 1,024-page Charles Dickens novel, ambling to a conclusion by the end of this month.
In what Dickens would call the bookstalls, you will find Dan Simmons's novel, "Drood" ("Big in size, big in scope, big in audacity and verve" - Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune), and Matthew Pearl's "The Last Dickens" ("Excruciatingly tedious jumble of potted history, murder, mayhem, mesmerism, sexism, stalking, piracy, secret identity, and opium" - the Globe's Katherine Powers). Headed for New York? If you can't score "Wicked" tickets, you can always take in "A Tale of Two Cities" ("One of those unfortunate shows that are neither witty in themselves nor able to inspire wit in others" - Ben Brantley, The New York Times).
A grandiose production based on a 19th-century novel about the French Revolution? "Tale" seems to have mizzed the boat.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Next month, Atlantic Monthly Press will publish Richard Flanagan's Tasmanian novel, "Wanting," which unites Dickens, the polar explorer John Franklin, and an Aboriginal girl named Mathinna, "to explore desire and the costs of trying to use reason to control it." Dickens was fascinated by Franklin, who among other things inspired the James Taylor song "Frozen Man." On its heels comes Gaynor Arnold's "Girl in a Blue Dress," a novel about Dickens's marriage, a Victorian arrangement of Flaubertian complexity, to be sure. "It's not a slagging off on Dickens," Arnold told me. "He had very serious flaws and didn't behave well, but I have a lot of sympathy for him."
Can you wait until Christmas, the holiday that Dickens is said to have invented - or at least over-sentimentalized - in his story "A Christmas Carol"? Like
Jane Austen - who she? There is no denying that Charles Dickens, now minus 138 years old, is hotter than ever. London's Sunday Times reports that "America is again in the grips of Dickens mania," the "again" referring to Dickens's triumphal American tour of 1867-68, when "he was greeted like a modern-day rock star." He "cut," or stiffed, the crowd that gathered to hail him in Boston, according to The New York Times. Instead he repaired to the Parker House to hobnob with "Prof. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Prof. Longfellow, and other literary celebrities."
That was actually Dickens's second triumphal tour of the United States. His 1842 visit, which began in Massachusetts, produced "American Notes," with its famous passages about the Perkins School for the Blind and the mills along the Merrimack River.
What explains the enduring allure? For one thing, there is the ineffable Englishness of it all. Never underestimate America's complicated reverse snobbery and secret adulation of the country we nominally rejected in 1776. Public television could run a series about Queen Elizabeth's smelly corgis and it would outdraw "We Shall Remain," the network's Native American wheezer, hands down.
And after all, a Jim Carrey movie, a shot-through-gauze BBC series, a Broadway play, and a Dan Simmons gothic novel conveniently excuse us from the real work - the real pleasure - of reading novels that tend to run long. Will I finally read "David Copperfield"? Or wait for the inevitable costume docudrama? I think I know the answer.
Special bonus for readers of this column: The Massachusetts Albanian American Society invites you to a book party on April 25 at 6 p.m. at the Vlora restaurant on Boylston Street. Yes, expect Albanian cuisine and yes, expect to see figures from the Albanian-American community, such as ex-WBUR uberboss Jane Christo and Hollywood director Stan Dragoti, perhaps best known for his tumultuous marriage to 1970s supermodel Cheryl Tiegs.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
