I'm a big Dickens fan - there's something about his work that just soothes me. I'm not sure if it's sinking back into another era, or the masses of adjectives, or the fact that once I start one of his books I'm in it for the long haul. Maybe a combination of all of these reasons. Back around Halloween (yep, still super behind on these reviews), I plunged into this to see what Dickens' ghost stories were like, especially A Christmas Carol.
I won't lie, I was left a little disappointed. Although the content was fab because duh Dickens, the way it was put together was less so. I expected to be reading a collection of standalone short stories, but maybe the word 'complete' should have warned me: about two thirds of the collection were extracts from full on novels. Which made for some very confused reading. I think it's hard enough to keep up with the vast numbers of characters he includes in his writing, but then taking little chunks out of the book made it just impossible to keep up with because you were bombarded with them in such a short space of time. It just really didn't work for me.
However, this is something that would be useful if you're looking into Victorian ghost stories and monsters. It's something that I'd personally love to learn more about (I so want to read some penny dreadfuls), but I'd be happy to not have them all crammed into a volume like this.
The one real saving grace was A Christmas Carol. The Muppet's version is one of my favourite Christmas films, and it was great to see how they'd stayed so close to the book and completely strayed from it in other parts. And the biggest shocker? There's only one Marley! If you don't know the tale of A Christmas Carol, it tells us of a grumpy old man called Ebenezer Scrooge who hates Christmas, until four ghosts visit him in the night determined to change his mind.
I honestly couldn't give this anything above 2 stars, and I just wish I'd read A Christmas Carol as a standalone book!
No comments:
Post a Comment