Rana, usually whatever I'm reading at the time. Whether it's good or bad, I'll finish it anyway, but then a typical paperback only takes me a couple of hours so it's no worse than sitting through a bad film.

A better option than Peake but in the same vein is Stephen Donaldson. He's a bit of a show-off in using long words for the sake of it (and he tends to use the same long words all the time, so it's not cos he uses them naturally! :-) For depth of vision, the Gap-war series doesn't have much competition, and the "Daughter of Regals" short stories are pretty damn good too and more accessible. Stephen King's Dark Tower series started well, but has vanished up its own bum in basically becoming a series of product placements for his other books. Oh, and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash isn't anything like it but it's genius nonetheless.

You're dead right about Dickens adapting well as a TV series - basically he was writing half-hour Victorian soap operas, the same way that Conan Doyle was writing 2-hour detective features, so the pacing adapts itself well to an episodic TV treatment. But the screenwriter has the option of editting the book to get a coherent script, and the director and actors have the option of tweaking the script and presentation to make it more believable/interesting/whatever.

Dickens used the text fairly well to embed the "in previous episodes" stuff into the current episode - these things would run for months at a time, so you couldn't guarantee not to miss one somewhere and hence he had to have some way of filling in anyone who'd arrived halfway through. It's not done too badly on that score, but when you read it all the way through as a book it doesn't work well - it just seems like he keeps repeating stuff.

Grab.