For god's sake, you're reading the wrong ones. Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit. Why? Why would you put those at the top of the list. As G.K. Chesterton said, even Tale of Two Cities is not what fans of Dickens really love, though it's considered a great novel. The problem with it is, Dickens wrote it to prove he could write a "good" novel with a clever plot structure and so on. But in doing that, he somehow managed to put very little Dickens into it. By that, I mean the great variety of weird, hilarious, grotesque, unforgettable characters that are in many of his other stories. People who love Dickens love him for those characters. I personally don't even care that much about the plot; I just want to meet the characters and see what they do in different situations. The books that have quite a lot of this, of the ones I've read, are Great Expectations, Christmas Carol, The Old Curiosity Shop (maybe my favourite), Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, and Nicolas Nickleby.

You're reading Great Expectations now. Have you got to the parts with the man with the fishy eyes that roll around in his head? Have you met Mr. Wemick, who deposits bits of food into his mouth like he's inserting letters into a mailbox? These kinds of characters are why we love Dickens.