A Christmas Carol

Okay, the first book I read this year was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  Sadly, even though I know this story inside and out (doesn't everybody?) and have seen about 500 version of the movie (hasn't everybody?), I've never really read the book from beginning to end.  Actually, I've never read any Dickens from beginning to end... okay, I've never read any Dickens at all.  Which makes my jokes about little french waifs and other such Dickensian references much more smart alec than they were before... which was pretty smarty.  (Side note, I used to call my brother a smart alec all the time- this was when I was younger and woudln't use the more acceptable term that I have of course edited from my public blog- and he would always come back with, "Smart Alec?  No, smart Erik!"  Smart alec.  That's why I never really use that term anymore... so if I'm ever talking to you and you hear me say smart@$$, I'm sorry... it's just because I can't bring myself to hear "smart alec, no, smart erik" in my head all day, which is what happens to me if I hear those words.  It's like "It's a Small World"... it just keeps going and going and going and going... I find myself grinding my teeth to the rhythm of "smart alec, no, smart erik"... and I'm off again.  Sorry.)

Okay.  So, I was surprised that I thoroughly enjoyed reading that which I have memorized in movie version.  I figured it would be hard to wade through Dickens' 19th Century (read: tedious) English, but it wasn't.  It was pretty fun.  Although this is the first book in about three years that I have wished I had a dictionary for... just a few nights ago Andy and I were in Barnes and Noble trying to figure out how to spend my Christmas gift card from his mom, and I saw a calculator-sized electronic dictionary thin enough to use as a bookmark.  It was called the reader's dictionary.  "Pooh," says I, "Were but my immeasurable intellect ever lacking in the vocabularian department, perhaps I would have need of such a device.  But what ho!  For my knowldege spans all realms of words and origins, and never hast myself the need to unravel a mysterious collection of letters."  So I didn't get it.  And two days later I came across a word I had to look up.  So much for my collosal brain.  Anyway, that's what we have the internet for, but I sure wished I had a handy-dandy little pocket dictionary marking the page of my confusion.  I'm digressing again.  Oh, by the way... if you know me at all, you know that this blog will be 25% "about the books" and 75% "the way my mind works."  But you'll still get some info about the books, I swear.  :)

Okay, so I liked the book.  There's no need to go any further.  You've all read it.  If not, go get it.  It's good.  I will say that the most shocking and pleasantly surprising fact I learned was that of all the movie versions I've seen, The Muppet Christmas Carol was the most true to the book.  True, in Dickens' version vegetables didn't sing and Bob Cratchitt wasn't a frog, but most of the speeches, narration, and images produced (minus the felt-covered characters and jelly bean eating rat) were lifted directly from the pages.  Especially, "...Caring not a button for the dark.  Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it."  So there, Brandon.

Oh, and I don't have that DVD yet, if anybody's looking for next Christmas's present for me... :)