An assessment of A Tale of Two Cities

It has been some time since I made a literature post. The reasons for this are numerous but I will be brief in my excuses.

First, I got a puppy. Having a puppy that was restless meant that the only way to calm him down a bit was to turn out the lights. When my reading light was on he felt he was free to get up and move around (which entailed his teething mouth moving around on any and every object within his grasp). So I turned out the lights resulting in a loss of my nightly reading time. This occurred about a day after I started A Tale of Two Cities.

Second, I became lazy. I don't just read at night; but, that was when I did a majority of it. I was lazy and didn't make up for my lost time in other parts of the day. That was intellectually lazy.

Third, Dickens suffers from the same disease that I suffer from in writing, only his is a much more refined version. That is to say, he is wordy. While my wordiness often leads to useless ramblings down rabbit holes that don't exactly push the story along but serve as self-aggrandizing ornamentation his wordiness is wrapped in an incredible attention to detail. I found this to be a factor in my slowness of reading the book. The first book and the second book up until the storming of the Bastille was crafted incredibly to transport me into the period in such a way that I felt there. But also in a way to make me feel like I was trapped there. But after the storming of the Bastille and throughout the third book it felt like the pace of the story was livelier and quickened. I read this part much more swiftly.

As far as an assessment, who am I to critique? The story is powerful, fantastic and incredibly crafted. I enjoyed the third book immensely and felt a strong satisfaction in completing it. In my darker moments I wondered if I was like Sydney Carton of chapter 20 - no good, but desiring to be good. Upon completion of the book I felt as if I wasn't at all like Mr. Carton; I am not capable of such a sacrifice.

But I did have an idea for a book while reading this one. I will call it A Tale: A Novel Destruction. What I propose to do is to take every fourth word of the book and mix them up to create a story that is nothing like the original. I'm not sure if I can actually do it, but I'd like to try. I've heard it said that Charles Dickens is the greatest storyteller in the English language. Maybe I can be a quarter of the man he was.