The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

This book, while not quite Dickensian, weaves a number of related plots together as it follows the baseball career of Henry Skrimshander at Westish College, a small school in the Midwest whose former claim to fame had been the lecture that Herman Melville once gave there. There's the story about baseball, of course, but the book also delves into a variety of friendships in the baseball penumbra and beyond, reaching all the way to the office of the college's president. I thought the characters drove the plot in convincing ways. There were a number of nice nods to literary history (most notably Fifth Business and A Prayer for Owen Meany).

Ghosts I Have Been by Richard Peck

This book is about Blossom Culp, a young girl who lives in the Midwest in 1913. She's got the Second Sight and the main plot of the book is about how she sees the ghost of a British boy who died on the Titanic and gets to visit the Queen as a result. I found the plot a little bit slow, but I really like Blossom and her friends Miss Dabney and Alexander Armsworth.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

I found this story incredibly moving. It covers a broad swath of time, and you can definitely see where it's going at points, but I really loved its humanity. It starts with a kitten up a telephone pole, and only gets better from there. I was particularly interested in the variety of languages in play in the community, and the portrait of a multi-ethnic community it created. I was also interested in Alexandra's growth into her own person. Beautiful and well-worth the time both to read and to write about.