Jennifer Egan’s singular take on Charles Dickens, from “Morning Edition“‘s bicentennial story this morning:

If you were force-fed Dickens in middle school and hated him, it might be time to reconsider, Tomalin says. Novelist Jennifer Egan is a fan who came back to the books and unexpectedly found that Dickens felt modern.

“The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great TV series, like The Wire or The Sopranos,” says Egan. “There’s one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots. And so he would go off in all sorts of directions and create these amazing secondary characters who would go in and out of focus. But then there was also this sort of central spinal column of a plot that he would return to.”