Drood By Dan Simmons

   This book doesn't come out until February (thanks to Dan for making me take this book), but I still can't wait to recommend it.  It follows the final years of Charles Dickens life through the eyes of his less famous contemporary Wilkie Collins (a decent author in his own right).  The outsiders look at famous authors genre (not really a genre, I just think it is) is pretty popular (again, probably just in my head).  I really liked Arthur and George (Sr. Arthur Conan Doyle) by Barnes that came out a few years back, and I love this novel.   Perhaps a bit too much of the thousand pages was devoted to Wilkie's opium addiction, but for a thousand paged novel, it really moved.  Dickens was in a train accident that changed his life and shaped his final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  Drood was the man Dickens claimed to have seen in the aftermath of that accident and became obsessed with, claiming to Wilkie (in the novel) that he thought he was an agent of Death.  It's a really interesting mystery, but if you'd rather not spend a month reading a book, skip it.