To close out my cannonball, I thought it’d be seasonally appropriate to revisit a Christmas classic. I say “revisit” even though I had never before read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but due to its cultural ubiquity I felt like I have. Like most people I’ve seen multiple adaptations of the story, from the Reginald Owens and Alistair Sim black-and-white movies to Michael Caine with the Muppets and the tragically typecast Scrooge McDuck in the Disney version, I’ve seen them all. So in reading the novella […]
A Classic Christmas Tale
Would you judge me if I said I hadn’t read A Christmas Carol until this December? And I’m an English teacher! Luckily the student-lead book club at my school decided they wanted to make sure they had read this Christmas classic before they went off to college. I’m glad they made this selection because it was certainly time for me to get my feet wet with this classic. This review is hard to write. What’s there really to say about one of the most well-known […]
A classic gets a pleasant but unnecessary sequel.
The Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol, is one of my favorite books. I love the language, the sly wit, and the simple but timeless story of the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge. I will confess I’ve never given much thought to what came next but this book is here to answer that question. For those familiar with A Christmas Carol you will immediately notice the descriptions and setup in the sequel is the same as the first book. The book is divided into the same […]
“Please, sir. I want some more.”
While I’ve been reading brand-new books and others that have languished on my to-read list, I’ve been trying to read books on my shelf that I own and haven’t cracked open yet. I’ve had a years-long stack that just hasn’t gotten read, so I thought if I checked out some of the audiobooks, I could get through that list faster. Oliver Twist was one of those books on my shelf. Charles Dickens is known for his picaresque tales of poverty, suffering, and corruption in England, […]
God Bless Us Every Quarter Cannonball!
Everyone knows the story of Ebenezer Scrooge and A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens as the story of a mean old miser named Scrooge who has a change of heart after being visited by four ghosts. I have seen many film versions of this story, but I can’t really choose a favourite amongst them as they include things that I like and things that I don’t. The main difference between the movies and the book is that the book has many things that the movies […]
Weighty but Worth It
[Finished 7/28/14] This weighty novel took a long time to finish (especially because it was way too big to lug with me on RAGBRAI) but overall, I found it fascinating and gripping, even as I noted some of the moments that felt like a “glorious mess,” particularly the ending. Donna Tartt tells the story of Theo Decker and his life reads like a Dickens’s story translated to the 21st century. A twist of fate finds Theo and his mom at a New York museum just […]