Dickens always goes better with a spoonful of laudanum to rein in some of the longer, more meandering sentences. That Victorian style of writing is somewhat vexatious for modern comprehension, trained – as it is – by sentences, short and sharp.
Dickens and his contemporaries writing styles was in part driven by them being written as serials for weeklies that charged by the word.
There's a whole section of Oliver Twist that's completely unnecessary for the story but gave him an extra few weeks of chapters and chapters of words and therefore money.
I picked up Nan Shepherd's Living Mountain the other night after finishing Bad Science, I wanted something lighter, and more entertaining, I've reined myself into 2 chapters a night otherwise I'd have finished it the first night and not made it to my computer for 10am.
I'm trying to remember what the last book I had that with was, but that time I really did keep reading until 5am and was late for work...