A Christmas Carol

I, like I assume most people, know this story very well even though I have never actually read it. I'm honestly most familiar with it through Mickey's Christmas Carol and The Muppet Christmas Carol, which are both great! In fact, seeing The Muppet Christmas Carol with live music from the local symphony orchestra is what inspired me to finally read it.

And I loved it! I've always loved the structure of this story, it just feels like one of the classic basic archetypes of a story that hits on something interesting with every beat and doesn't have any fat on it. The quick character arc and morals expounded by his change are also very satisfying.

This Dickens guy has a pretty good way with words too, I'd say. I love a lot of the lines that are often quoted verbatim in adaptations (“A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”, “If they would rather die, they'd better do it, and decrease the surplus population”, “Come in! and know me better, man!”, etc). Each character, time period, and location is imbued with so much life and texture, and they all become very clear in my mind while reading it.

I actually listened to this via an audiobook that was narrated by Hugh Grant and made available for free through Audible, though it annoyingly had ads littered throughout as I don't have a subscription to Audible right now. It is a pretty short read as well, so I think I might try to revisit this one more often in the coming years, both in written form and audiobook, and of course as performed by Muppets.

I picked up this edition for a buck or two at a thrift shop. It contains four stories: A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Tree, Christmas Dinner, and excerpts from The Pickwick Papers.

A Christmas Carol is an absolutely classic and essential Christmas story, and I surely have no novel insight into it. It is unquestionably the best piece of the collection and by itself would have been five-star material.

A Christmas Tree is an essay in which Dickens recounts various details of a Christmas celebration from a child's perspective, including specific toys and ghost stories. While the particularities of a Victorian Christmas are interesting from a historical viewpoint, the essay comes across as rambling and tedious, especially in juxtaposition with the much superior Carol. I doubt I will ever return to this piece.

Christmas Dinner is pleasant enough and only eight pages long.

The Pickwick Papers excerpts are the other highlight of the collection, full of classic Dickensian charm. While the narrative concerning a Christmas wedding is amusing at moments, I particularly enjoyed the ghost story of Gabriel Grub.

This collection is nice on the whole, even if none of the other stories reach the soaring heights of the titular tale.

It's a classic for a reason! For those who celebrate Christmas this is definitely seminal. I actually enjoy the various film adaptations more, since the descriptions of people's festivities sometimes relied on contemporary knowledge, but I got the gist, and yes, this brings a wonderful Christmassy feeling and reminds us what we really value about that time of year.

Scrooge wasn't as bad a guy as everyone makes him out to be. He's just a grumpy old man. And his money is his; people's sense of entitlement to it frustrated me. But he didn't go out of his way to be a jerk. He wasn't actively seeking to ruin lives. Also he had a lonely childhood. Stands to reason he would be guarded with his heart so as not to get hurt again. I feel like he needed kindness not fear to change him. I really liked the concept behind Marley's chains. I thought that was pretty interesting. Overall, a good read but I probably won't read this every year like I know some people do.

Executive Summary: A definite classic that holds up well after all these years.

Audio book: I really love Tim Curry. His deep and creepy voice is an excellent fit for this story.

Full Review
I read some Dickens in high school, but for some reason never picked this up. The Disney adaptation of this story was always one of my favorite Christmas specials to watch every year.

Dickens is never going to be one of my favorites, but I may have to start listening to this book every few years at least.

Sure this is a Christmas story, and therefore not going to be for everyone, but really it's more a story about being a good and generous person, and to cherish the people in your life.

It's also a fantasy story, or at least a paranormal one, so that puts it in my usual wheelhouse anyways. I'm sure someone whose religious can point out all the symbolism in this story, but for me it's just a great story that reminds me fondly of my childhood.

Every Christmas, I start to read a Christmas Carol. And every Christmas, I somehow only get through half the book. No matter how early in the month I start reading it, I always forget to finish. However, I thoroughly enjoy the half that I read every year. Maybe one year I'll get through the whole thing. In the meantime, I highly recommend you read this one - especially if you love any of the movies!

As a general rule, I find Dickens to be a bit of a downer; I accept that he is a great writer but I can only take so much misfortune in one sitting. Fortunately, A Christmas Carol is not, in my opinion, his standard fare, and is all the better for it. Granted, there is misfortune aplenty, but at least in this case it serves a purpose, rather than just highlighting how crappy Victorian life could be. In addition, the humour, albeit satirical, is more to the fore, rather than the smiling-through-the-pain approach of his other novels.

What really elevates this novel to the realm of “revisitibility”, however, is the audiobook, with narrator Simon Prebble. Much as Dickens originally intended, this feels more like a theatre experience than a dry reading. If anyone is, like me, in two minds about Dickens, I can strongly recommend this version.

I've never loved A Christmas Carol, although I know many people do. It seemed so barren to me. I never cared about Scrooge, and his conversion in the end never mattered to me. 

This is the first time I've listened to it as an audiobook, and boy, did that ever change my mind. I absolutely loved the experience of listening to it. The narrator for the version I listened to is Tim Curry, and he brought a lot of emotion into the story. I cannot think of a more perfect narrator for this book, and I'm grateful to have found this version. In his reading, Scrooge is by turns angry, bitter, bored, scared, silly, and joyful. I cried through most of the book as I really began to care about Scrooge and to see some of his foibles in me. Bravo!