The Old Curiosity Shop

It gives me enormous personal pleasure to read Charles Dickens because for a very long time I assumed that his writing was far too intellectual for the likes of me.  I read Oliver Twist and discovered that it's not!

 

I love The Old Curiosity Shop and plan to read it again some time in the future. It's a nice long book - this copy is 608 pages long (I read the e-book version) - with plenty to get my teeth into. Yes, it's wordy and Dickens does make many descriptions in much detail but it's just a case of getting used to it and then it's amazing! Towards the end I was getting cross if I was interrupted and during the day I looked forward to finding out what happened next.

 

To the story.  It's about an old man and his granddaughter and what befalls them as a result of his life. She is around 14 years old and he is in his eighties. The old man ran The Old Curiosity Shop until ......... but I don't want to spoil the story. It did bring me to tears in the third chapter from the end, I found it so moving, and that has never happened to me before. 

 

I'm glad that I read it, I will continue to read Dickens and I thoroughly recommend this.