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A Tale of Two Cities: A Read-Along

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Confession time: Despite having been educated in England for my entire school career, I have only ever read one book by that famous national treasure of ours, Charles Dickens.  Yes, you've guessed it; the one that I've read is A Christmas Carol.  Everything else that Dickens has written intimidates me for reasons that I couldn't tell you.  Probably concerns about verbosity and/or dullness?  Something like that.

We were also forced to over-analyse some of Great Expectations at some point while I was in high school (for those in the US, when I was somewhere between 11 and 15), although I couldn't tell you exactly when.  I think a combination of it being read aloud by a host of disinterested teens and the inevitable "But what do you think Dickens meant by placing that comma there?" discussions killed the experience for me and I've never strayed in Dickens' direction since. 

It's time to fix that.

Bex at An Armchair by the Sea is hosting a read-along during the month of December that I'm being brave and joining.  Off the back of my recent read-along success with The Moonstone, I'm kind of into the whole read-along idea as a way of encouraging myself to read more classics.  My Dad did recently read A Tale of Two Cities and sung its praises all the while.  Being a wimp, I added it to my mental "must read" list and then moved on.  I have it on good authority that the story is gripping and that the writing isn't all rambly and about some kind of workhouse.  We'll see, I suppose...

The schedule looks like this:

December 1st - 8th: Beginning of Book 1 - end of Book 2 Chapter 9 (first 15 chapters of the book)

December 8th - 15th: Book 2 Chapter 10 - end of Book 2 (chapters 16- 30)

December 15th - 22nd: Book 3 - end (chapters 31 -45)

See?  Perfectly manageable!  I'll be posting at the end of each section and will keep up with everybody else as I'm going on Twitter as @LitAddictedBrit using the hashtag #DickensinDecember

Go on, SIGN UP HERE!

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