A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
367 p.

Penguin Popular Classics, 1994
(first published 1859 by Chapman and Hall.)

For Decades ‘08.

Back cover blurb:

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’

Those are the famous lines of Dickens’s stirring tale of two cities, London and paris, at the time of the French Revolution. Suspense gathers from the opening scene, the dramatic coach journey to Dover and the rescue of Dr manette from incarceration in the Bastille. At the centre of the novel are the figures of Sydney Carton and Charles Darna, both men in love with the doctor’s beautiful daughter Lucie, linked together by fate and by the engulfing terrors of revolution.

A Tale of Two Cities was written at a time of crisis in Dickens’s life. It is a wonderful love story and, aside from The Pickwick Papers, the most popular of all Dickens’s novels.

Not counting this novel, I have only ever read one book by Dickens, and that’s Great Expectations. I read that in a strange Swedish translation, and wasn’t much impressed. So, I didn’t expect that much from this book. I have always thought that Dickens is a big bore, and was so very surprised to discover that he was so funny! I was also surprised to be so fascinated by his writing. Given, his sentences are roughly seven lines each, but they are so intricate and exciting that I didn’t care. Sometimes I paused and made myself read certain lines again, just because they were pretty. A lot of the time I skimmed through the longest sentences, but that’s not Dickens’ fault. I honestly enjoyed reading it, which is something I didn’t expect I would be saying.

This book sees the return of the trend of my favourite characters dying. A couple of years ago, I could barely open a book without the most fascinating character dying. And here it comes back! Of course, he survived until, well, a couple of pages before the end, but still. I was very sad; but it was a good sad. It was a good ending, too. A good ending to a good novel. I should read more Dickens.

eta. It was impossible to find the proper cover of the version I read, so I just went with the original title page. It is decent enough.

Bilbo: en hobbits äventyr
(The Hobbit or There And Back Again)
J.R.R. Tolkien
Translated by Britt G. Hallqvist
Illustrations by Tove Jansson
308 p.

Rabén & Sjögren, 1962
(first published 1937 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.)

For Decades ‘08 and Here Be Dragons.

Back cover blurb:

none

I read this book a year or so before the first Lord of the Rings film was released, and it took longer time still before I actually realised that the upcoming film and the book I had read some time before were even connected. (what can I say? I wasn’t a particularly bright kid, and I’m still daft.) I read it in the same version as I did now, an older translation and beautiful pictures by Tove Jansson (who, if you don’t recognise the name or the style, also wrote and drew the Moomin-stories, as well as illustrated several other childrens’ novels). It is a lovely translation, and it isn’t often I can say that. Admittedly, I sometimes started wondering if the text was only translated, or if it had been altered in any way. As I have never read The Hobbit in English, I can’t tell. The style of writing is vastly different from the one he came to use when writing Lord of the Rings, which I haven’t read in English either. I am a little ashamed, yes.

Now, when I was tiny, I loved this book. When I later read Lord of the Rings, I loved that even more. I was completely enraptured by these hobbits and dwarves and men who were so amazing and different from any other thing I’d read. I never particularly liked the elves, I thought them self-important and more than a little egotistical. The humans were the ones for me. Still, I thought them the best books ever published. I never re-read The Hobbit, which is a little peculiar, but the trilogy I read three or four times. Completely brilliant. Now, when I read it again, I started to feel a little nervous. After fifty pages I didn’t enjoy it at all as much as I ought to. I ought to swoon and go “Oh Tolkien!” in wonder, but these swoons were illuminating in their absence. It was very alarming. And quite upsetting. I really wanted to love this book as much as I did when I was ten.

In the end I didn’t. I liked it more than I did when I started, but it never filled me with that alarming sense of joy that was present the first time. I liked the middle a lot. The middle made me happy. The end confused me a bit, because I had got a strong idea of what was going to happen: the dwarves were going to hunt down the dragon and everything was going to be hunky-dory. Of course, this didn’t happen. I remembered vaguely what was going to happen - who was going to do the dragon in and a few of who were dying. That didn’t match with my view of what should happen. When the great battle started I found myself disappointed again, because in my mind, a great big battle wasn’t really justified for this. The orcs hadn’t been that important before and the dragon was the fiend! Battles where hundreds of people die are not necessary! I guess reading a few Tolkien-ripoffs has taken its toll already. That it ricochetted on Tolkien himself was a bit of misery, though.

I don’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it. I did enjoy it, but with the expectation so high, I loved it less than I wanted to. When I reread it, in several years, I will probably read it in English. This translation is beautiful, the poems and songs are fantastic, but reading the original is always nice. If we had owned it in English (which we don’t. We have a copy of the first edition of Silmarillion, a book it is highly unlikely I’ll read again, but not The Hobbit in English. Two in Swedish, though.), I would have read it in that language. This one copy I read is so worn and loved that the back has fallen off and the spine is leaving. The edges are banged and frayed. Still, it is a lovely edition of a more than decent book.

Dracula
Bram Stoker
402 p.

Penguin Red, 2006
(first published 1897 by Archibald Constable and Company)

For Decades ‘08.

Back cover blurb:

Count Dracula’s castle is a hellish world where night is day, pleasure is pain and the blood of the innocent is prized above all. Young Jonathan Harker approaches the gloomy gates with no idea of what he is about to face…

And back in England eerie incidents are unfolding as strange puncture marks appear on a young woman’s neck. Can Harker’s fiancée be saved? And where is the evil Dracula?

The blurb above is a bit misguiding, but seeing as almost anyone can tell you what the book is about, it doesn’tbother me much. It is an extremely good novel. Like a lot of people (probably), I have been exposed to the Dracula-story uncountable times; I’ve seen lots of different film versions and parodies and all sorts of things. My sister was a bit of a vampire-buff, but I never got around to read Dracula. Until now, of course. And it is brilliant, it really is. The found I almost found best was that the characters were so full of life. They were believable and felt as though they could have been real. Most characters in books from this century seem to be quite stiff and don’t show much emotion. These characters do. The men in it embrace each other and cry and show a lot of affection to each other. I love that. Van Helsing, the slightly mad but yet so brilliant professor in almost every subject, was the sort of character I wanted to give a real big hug because he seemed so sad. My favourite character, who seems to be changed a lot in most of the filmed version, is Dr. Seward, who is gently and noble and loyal, the kind of traits I wish I would have, but sadly don’t. Dr. Seward is also a bit of tech geek (yes, in that day and age), and it was fantastic to see how he longs for his phonograph (a kind of gramophone) when he has been forced to write by hand.

Dracula is narrated by several different characters, in the form of journal entries and letters. Unlike many novels of this kind, the reason why they write a journal is justified; every character seems to have a reason for setting down their thoughts. The characters read each other’s journals and together they form a beautiful entirety. There were two things I did not love about this novel. One of them was how Mina and Jonathan Harker were very wussy at times. If they had not been in love and married, I would not have any problem with them. The other problem was a little note at the end of the novel, telling us that everyone was happily married and they had children and all sorts of things. It felt a bit over-the-top. But then again (as my sister said) it is Victorian. And they were a little strange.

edit. I forgot about this as it wasn’t that annoying, but there was one more thing; the footnotes were missing. They were marked out and everything, but there were no footnotes. I guess it was a relief, because it takes so much time to turn to the back all the time.