If you ask anyone I know, they'll tell you I hate classics. This is not entirely true, as I love many classics. Though, of course, most of the ones I care to read are written by J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis or Isaac Asimov. There's just something about classics. They're hard to read, often uninteresting, and sometimes just stupid.
I was assigned A Tale of Two Cities to read for school. It was the first novel I'd read by Charles Dickens, and it started out seeming like any other classic that I'd read (other than the good ones): utterly hard to read, full of sentence fragments, full of random punctuation, and an overall boring feel to it. Now that I look back, the beginning shouldn't have been boring; I'd just been too dead set against classics to see the ingenuity.
In the end, A Tale of Two Cities is a great read full of unique characters, a story you'll never forget, and the markings of an awesome author. I now know why a certain friend of mine has been trying very hard to get me to read Dickens' books. There are important happenings and subtle hints to future parts of the story hidden all along the journey of this wonderful piece of historical and French Revolution novel that once you finish you just want to start over!
The character development is inspiring, the hidden Easter eggs are ingenious, and the ending is beautiful. If you can get through the long, long beginning and middle of the book (which I'm sure will be much better the second read through), A Tale of Two Cities is be a great book to pick up. I highly recommend it.
Reuben Horst
No comments:
Post a Comment