A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

It was the best of books, it was the worst of…

Nope can’t do it. Get out of here with those bad puns production team! Not today! No sir. I say again. Not. Today.

I despise this book. If it were up to me, this would be my bottom book of the year. Alas I have some dumb personality traits like integrity and self-awareness.

Before you roll your eyes and say classic Fromm hating on a great classic again: 1. I can admit that the ending of this book is great, 2. There are points of absolute brilliance within, and 3. This is still a 55. Usually my worst books of the year are down sub 40.

And then I’ll ask you to quote me one other thing out of this book outside the g’damn first line. Do it, you can’t. And if you can it’s because you looked it up.

My first major complaint with this book is the pacing. The beginning is so slow, like unbearably slow. I have no problem with a slow burn, but there’s so much fumbling in the dark here as the reader that I lost interest chapter after chapter. It does pay off at the end, but at that point I found myself not caring what happened to anyone in this story.

Surprisingly, I didn’t find the English overly archaic outside of the dialogue. It’s a little annoying but it’s not the most jarring classic I’ve experienced.

My second complaint, and my biggest complaint, is how fake this book felt. The antagonists across the board come off as blood-thirsty caricatures and the streets of Paris felt as though they were inspired by paintings alone. And look, I understand Revolutionary Paris wouldn’t make my list of “top ten historical places to visit for a good time,” but it all felt so sketched as opposed to painted. There was no nuance, no depth. For a book that presents itself as a “classic of historical fiction” I had to look up if Dickens had even been to Paris (he was indeed a hardcore Francophile which…makes my point?).

Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so strongly about this if I didn’t read it back to back with Le Fanu’s excellent collection In a Glass, Darkly. Go read The Room in The Dragon Volant and compare the evocative prose. You can’t. I’ve also seen all of the locations in both in person and can confirm that Le Fanu writing a ghost story is infinitely more historically evocative than what Dickens put forth. I’m convinced if it wasn’t for the understandably memorable first line this book would be lost within his own prestigious repertoire. Had it been written by someone outside Victorian England, we’d pay it little thought.

Overall, this book struck me as pretentious. It’s a book that sits on the shelf and everyone goes “oh yeah a Tale of Two Cities, so classic,” without ever giving it an iota of thought. Dump it and go read In a Glass, Darkly instead.

Final Grade (all out of ten):

Plot: 7

Characters: 5

Conflict: 6

Theme: 4

Setting: 4

Prose: 8

Tone: 7

Quality: 9

Impact: 4

Enjoyment: 1

Overall: 55/100

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A/N:

A quick note on my grading philosophy which I formed listening to a few movie critics. I believe that a 7 in any of the categories above constitutes “Good”. Anything above that is something that is above and beyond in any one particular category. I believe this creates a more nuanced evaluation of any Story. Very, very rarely do I give scores above 90 (8 since I started grading books back in 2022). Consider anything a 70 or above the equivalent of 5 stars. You may note that some entries are tied. The tiebreakers are the higher individual score in Enjoyment, then Impact, then Quality, then back up to Plot and descending from there.

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