A nearly perfect book!

Cosy christmassy feel with Hugh Grant narrating it!

I sincerely enjoyed a Christmas carol and will probably read it yearly. However the rest of the stories brought down the rating. Some of them felt unfinished while others simply weren’t entertaining at all

Annual Christmas reread

**Please note, this review is for the specific “Readers Digest” edition. For my reviews of the text of these three books, please see my shelves. **

The books published by the “Readers Digest Association” are always beautifully produced, albeit they do not have ISBNs and perhaps are not regarded as mainstream publishing. This one is no exception. It is a hardback, with a green leatherette cover, and a red spine. Gold tooling is used for the title, the author, and for the decorative border. Inside, the paper used is heavy quality, smooth and creamy white (not glaring) and the print is dense and clear. It is sturdily bound, does not stay open, but equally is easy to hold open at the correct angle. As I say, they are nice, quality books.



This one contains the first three stories from the collection of five “Christmas Books”, written by Charles Dickens. The first is the perennially popular “A Christmas Carol” from 1843. The following year he wrote “The Chimes” which was published at Christmas in 1844, followed by “The Cricket on the Hearth” for Christmas in 1845. He was to write two more, but their popularity decreased year by year, so from then on Dickens was to write a considerable shorter Christmas story to publish in his magazine, and there are twenty more of these.



The first ever Christmas book, the novella “A Christmas Carol”, has been published in many editions. This one has the rare treat of including copious illustrations by the very talented - and unmistakable - Arthur Rackham, one of the leading illustrators from the “Golden Age” of British book illustration, during the first half of the 20th century. There are watercolours, incorporating some outline pen work, pen and India ink drawings, and silhouettes, all of which are listed at the beginning. The first page of the text is devoted to a list of characters, printed with a border, and looking rather like a theatre programme. The text follows with each colour illustration given a full page, and the black and white ones varying.



“The Chimes” also has illustrations by Arthur Rackham: watercolours, ink drawings, and silhouettes as before, although there are fewer because this is a shorter book. The characters in this one too are listed at the beginning.



“The Cricket on the Hearth” published for Christmas in 1845, uses different illustrators: Robert and Barbara Buchanan. Although an attempt has been made to match the techniques, the palette, and the style used, these are clearly modern illustrations, with none of the energy, verve and character of Arthur Rackham.

Altogether though, this is a lovely book to have. Even Dickens’s two short Prefaces have been included, and there are a few pages of an “Afterword”, adapted from “The Greatest Little Book in the World” by A. Edward Newton, which was first published in 1923.

Here are links to my reviews of the text of each of these three books:

A Christmas Carol ... Jean's review

The Chimes ... Jean's review

The Cricket on the Hearth ... Jean's review

"I will honour christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. the spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach."

this was exactly what I was looking for in a christmas story. very easy and simple to read with a cute underlying message. it's a bit childish but when it comes to something lighthearted to get me in the christmas mood I don't mind that at all. there's also a great audiobook version with a full cast and background noise and it will probably end up being something I'm gonna listen to at the start of every holiday season from now on just to boost my holiday spirit a bit. the reason I couldn't rate this was because I read "a christmas carol and other christmas writings" and there was such a difference between what I would've rated the different stories that I just couldn't find a fair middle. I would rate a christmas carol by itself five stars but the others were really average and not at all memorable. if you own this edition I honestly wouldn't waste my time reading anything other than a christmas carol.

ig: @winterrainreads

Christmas writings seem to often be drenched in nostalgia - even T.S. Eliot succumbed to it with The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. Dylan Thomas is another example. Dickens is no exception, with additional syrupy sentimentalism and overt Christian evangelism mixed with supernatural elements. Other famous Dickensian themes are also present; urban poverty and social injustice.

I found much of the book forgettable, the exceptions being the two longer stories, A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man. The former had little impact, bled of all power by exposure to countless pop culture re-tellings. The latter made more of an impression - not only unfamiliar but showing some skill at atmosphere in the supernatural parts, which I could have wished for more of. The moral that our sorrows, troubles and wrongs are what make us empathetic and compassionate is as heavy handed as the tone of the much more famous tale of Scrooge.

So, dear readers, my limited experiences with Dickens have not been very positive: Hard Times as a teenager was a disaster. This was mostly meh. I want to give him one last chance, though, and I enlist your help: what is the ONE novel likely to convert me into a Dickens fan? Suggestions in the comments, please!

How can you rate one of the greatest morality novellas of all time? It's a Christmas classic! Preaching compassion, sympathy, empathy and generosity, A Christmas Carol is beautifully written, atmospheric, playful and politically charged.

Oh, Dickens... you've done it again. Pulling at my heartstrings during this special time of year, Christmas. I'm so glad I decided to read this during the Holiday. You see, I'm always left with a bad feeling during Christmas because it makes me so neurotic. Cleaning, shopping, making food, parties, no time to do everything... CHAOS! I detest the feeling of "GO GO GO" and "BUY EVERYTHING". I wish we could live in the times when Christmas was all about giving to those in need and gathering round a table full of Christmas goodies and cheer.

Reading this has relaxed my anxiety during this Holiday season and I think this might become a tradition... Amber, you must read A Christmas Carol every year before you start going crazy from all the expectations. The characters are as wonderful as any others Dickens writes and the comedy is tenfold when it comes to Scrooge (as I viewed him before to what he is in the book). I think everyone should read "A Christmas Carol" before the Holiday and try and take the meaning to heart!

As for Dickens other stories in the book... my favorite was the "Christmas Tree". This story was unlike anything I would have expected out of Dickens and could very well be one of my favorite short stories of all time. It starts out describing a Christmas tree that we can all relate to and then meanders through life through the telling of tales that relate to the tree. Each story is philosophical and rich with description, enough to catch you off guard for a few paragraphs until you get into the flow again. This story was amazing and I highly recommend it to everyone.

Reviews for the contents of this book are linked way below.

Final analysis, 12/10/18:

Five years, or six Christmas seasons taking a few stories a year, and I'm finally done. It pains me to give one star to anything that contains A Christmas Carol which is my favorite book of all time, but I have to do it. The review is for the collection as a whole, and not for the stories. In fact, only one of them gets one star, though there were a few other duds. Several of the stories were incomplete, and that's explained in further detail below. If the stories had been told in their entirety, then I would probably give the collection 2.5 stars rounded up, or maybe even three solid stars, but we'll never know for sure since I haven't been given the opportunity to read everything. Only Dickens completists need apply here, and even they are apt to be disappointed as I was. Also, very few of these have any rereadability.

FYI: Very few of these stories have anything to do with Christmas or even take place at Christmastime. They're called Christmas stories because they came out at Christmastime, most of them in Dickens' magazines Household Words and All the Year Round, and telling stories at that time of year was a tradition. Most of the stories have Christmasy feel-good themes to them, though.

1-1-17 update:

I think I got this from Barnes and Noble for $7.00? It's worth every penny and not one cent more. I should've known that any 750 page hardback that cheap from B&N had to be defective in some manner or another. I got this book because I found out in an Amazon review that another Dickens Christmas book I had gotten, The Complete Christmas Stories of Charles Dickens, cut parts of the stories out. If there was a collaboration with another author (or several other authors), the parts with the other authors were cut out. I didn't want to read incomplete stories, so I got this book. Well, it turns out this suffers from the same deficiency. I just found that out tonight after making a point to read the bloody collaborations in December, and my thoughts on the publisher, Fall River Press, now run like this.

There are six collaborative efforts in this collection: "Mugby Junction," "The Seven Poor Travellers," "The Wreck of the Golden Mary," "The Holly Tree Inn," "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings," and "Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy." However, only Dickens' part is included. A couple of the stories felt incomplete, and now I understand why. And not only did they not put a disclaimer to that effect on the title page, they flat-out lie about it in the introduction. Take this sentence (please!): "Particularly noteworthy contributions to the magazine (All the Year Round) include the multi-contributor tale 'Dr. Marigold,' for which Dickens and Collins each wrote two chapters, and Dickens's solo story 'Mugby Junction.'"

Let's look at a few errors. In this very book on page 483 we have the title "Dr. Marigold - in Three Chapters." Last time I checked two and two made four. Even if they took out Collins' portion, that would still leave us with two chapters, and I'm not sure that "Dr. Marigold" was a collaborative effort with Collins in the first place. There's a separate section at the end with three stories under the heading "Written with Wilkie Collins," and "Dr. Marigold" ain't in it. But I don't trust this editor, so I really don't know what to make of any of that.

As for "Dickens's solo story 'Mugby Junction...'" Mah-fah, he wrote it with four other people, and I can prove it! This book has the first four chapters which Dickens wrote, but omits the last four chapters which were written by Andrew Halliday, Charles Collins (Wilkie's brother according to the internet), Hesba Stretton, and Amelia B. Edwards. Solo story my eye!

I don't think the editor intended to pull the wool over the public's eyes, but just practiced some shoddy research and compilation techniques. That doesn't mean this is a completely worthless collection. It has the five Christmas books and several other stories which Dickens wrote sans assistance. But I'm very disappointed that I didn't get the full versions of the six I mentioned.

The only reason I know of any of this is that my opinion was solicited by someone doing her doctorate on the collaborations. Suddenly I felt important and considered taking up pipe smoking again (tobacco, not crack, just to be clear), and I wanted to make a good impression with my scholarly insights. But I'm afraid I showed myself to be a complete rube from the onset, though she did say my opinion supports her research argument. I have no idea what that argument is, but I suspect it involves us members of the hoi-polloi not knowing that the Dickens we're reading is not the whole story. How many things can you find wrong with that sentence? I don't care, I'm not fixing it. This missing pieces thing has me mad enough to wanna book passage on The Golden Mary; I feel cheated.

But now I'm educated, and I have a mission to find the complete stories so I won't be bereft with next year's yuletide reading. (12/10/18 update: Fuck that shit; I'm so done with this.) This is proving to be rather difficult. Most of the stories at the Gutenberg Project are incomplete also, "Mugby Junction" being the exception. I found one thing that's available on a Kindle that claims to have the complete version of all of them, but I don't want it on a Kindle (I don't have an e-reader). I want it in a book, dammit. I'll report back on all this next year when I finish the stories in here I haven't read yet... if I decide to finish them, that is. Only one of them is definitely a Dickens-only dealio. Another is "Dr. Marigold" which may or may not have been written with Collins and may or may not include his contribution. The other two claim to have been written with Collins, but I have no guarantee that his portion is included. The one I've read so far in the Collins section, "The Wreck of the Golden Mary" is definitely missing parts and ends abruptly. (Details in the review itself.) Oh, what a pisser.

The Christmas Books:

Read Lord knows how many times since 2000 or so:
A Christmas Carol ★★★★★

Read in 2013:
The Chimes ★★★✰✰
The Cricket on the Hearth ★★★★✰

Read in 2014:
The Battle of Life ★★✰✰✰
The Haunted Man ★★★★✰

The Short Stories:

Read in 2014:
The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton ★★★★✰

Read in 2015:
A Christmas Tree ★★✰✰✰
What Christmas Is as We Grow Older ★✰✰✰✰
The Poor Relation's Story ★★✰✰✰
The Child's Story ★★★✰✰
The Schoolboy's Story ★★★☆☆
Nobody's Story ★★★☆☆
The Seven Poor Travellers ★★★☆☆ (2.5)
The Holly-Tree ★★✰✰✰

Read in 2016:
Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings ★★★★✰ (3.5)
Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy ★★★☆☆
Mugby Junction ★★★★✰
The Wreck of the Golden Mary ★★★☆☆ (2.5)

Read in 2017:
Going into Society ★★★☆☆
Doctor Marigold ★★★☆☆ (2.5)

Read in 2018:
Collaborations with Wilkie Collins:

No Thoroughfare ★★★★✰
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices ★★★☆☆

A Christmas Carol
. . . ⇢ ˗ˏˋ 4 stars! ࿐ྂ

n  ❝ No warmth could warm, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. ❞n

This is such a good book to read right before Christmas and i'm so happy i did. It's a very simple story but since i didn't know it i found it very entertaining and sweet. Even if it's a classic and might seem overwhelming to start because of that but the writing was actually super comprehensible and quick to read. It's definitely the easiest classic i've read!

The entire book is just such a whole vibe for winter and the holidays. And i'm super happy to have read it!

n  ❝ While there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour. ❞n

love,
thea

Reminds me what Christmas is all about...the giving ♥ (2015)
Wonderful story of compassion.
The book also contains two other Christmas stories.
The Haunted Man is what I read this time (2016). Again the story is set at Christmas eve, a darker and more subtle take revolves around the fate of a teacher of chemistry, named Redlaw, whose lonely existence is oppressed by a host of gloomy memories. Redlaw wants to be rid of every bad memory of suffering, unhappiness, and wrong that he has ever known. His wish is granted, only to realize that he has destroyed who he really is!