A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

from goodreads

3.5 stars

I have a confession to make. I am vain and like pretty things. When I was going onto my library's website to put a hold on this book I totally chose what edition I wanted based on the cover. The cover was so beautiful and I said to myself "I want to be seen reading a book that looks so great". Man did that ever backfire. When I picked it up the book was huge. And that is when I realized. This book was actually two books in one. It had both A tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. As I started to read I found my wrist starting to hurt and my arm going a bit numb because of the heft of this book. I had to return it and get a different copy.

So lesson most definitely learned. Don't be vain. Especially when choosing book editions!


Synopsis

This book is set in London and Paris, hence the two cities in the title. It looks at how the reign of terror was really not as black and white as the new fraternity made it out to be.

My Thoughts

I had heard so many people say they loved this book and it is their favourite Dickens, so I went into it expecting a great heart wrenching story. And while there are some great moments in the story, it was not my favourite.

As with any Dickens there was a great tangled web of characters. Everyone was related in someway. Dickens definitely uses the whole six (or less) degrees of separation in his novels. But I felt that the characters were rather bland and that the revelations were not as surprising. I kind of figured a lot of things out before they were revealed.

We all know that Dickens can be wordy and that some of the things he refers to are his contemporaries and not ours. Sometimes that can make things confusing. I found at times I was confused about what he was talking about or referring to. He called inanimate objects, she or he. And so it took me a while before I could figure out that he was talking about a gun, or a political movement and not a person. Other times I was just lost and had to reread to know what was going on.

I did like the themes of the book. It looks at the whole concept of sins of our fathers. Should we be condemned or punished for things our forefathers did, especially when we ourselves do not share their views or have not had the chance to prove ourselves? He also allowed us to look into crowd mania and how when we are by ourselves we wouldn't do acts of violence or allow them to happen but as a crowd we get caught up in the hysteria of it all. Especially when there is an us vs. them mentality. We have seen this play out in many countries and politics lately.

I loved that this was a historical novel. Sometimes when we think of authors and time periods before the 20th century we just sort of lump them all together. Shouldn't Austen and Dickens be contemporaries? Of course not, but we just don't think about it. Time and things changed at a snail's pace back then. So when I was reading this I always had in my head that Dickens was really looking back and making observations of the past. This happened 90 years before he wrote this. Was he reflecting on his own time with what happened in the past?

On the whole this book is worth reading. I just felt that the emotional intensity that you find in some of his other books just wasn't there.