A Tale of Two Cities

The latest book in my series of English (and sometimes American) litterature classics, and my fourth or fifth Dickens (one of these days, I'll make a list..). I think I'm developping some sort of passion for Dickens'storytelling.
For this one, there was a difference though: since I began reading it just a week before Harry Potter HBP hit the shelves, I had to stop in the middle to read HBP and finish it afterwards. Well since I've been a little disappointed in HBP and went on vacation, I had a sort of reading hiatus.

I shouldn't have.

This book is just great, and as much as I love the way Dickens depicts characters and their miseries, I found the way the story intricates into the French revolution made it an even better read. My oh My! How he depicts the violence and cruelty of the events through the eyes of Lucie beholding the carmagnole dance, and how this violence is rationalized by Sydney Carton in the last scene...

I'm French and I was 14 when France celebrated the 200th anniversary of its revolution, singing "la carmagnole", and wearing these red hats and tricoloured cocards. At this time, the motto of the nation was, and still is "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" (which can easily translated ;)), but is was not "Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death!"! When you're at school, you learn about kings and serfs, about the dates and personnalities of the revolution, about the Bastille and the guillotine, but there is no teacher to explain the violence of the revolution, and the daily life in those troubled times, no one to make it interesting. To make history (or whatever subject) interesting to kids, you have to have it intertwined with real world facts, something that can easily be grasped and remembered; anyway, I wish I had it explained that way.
But this is what history is about: it is a rationalizing process, always keeping only the big picture and the big changes and sending the costs and experience of these changes into oblivion. Everybody knows Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette were closely shaved by the "great sharp female" but who remembers how many fell under the blade of "Little Sainte Guillotine" and the atrocities of the people against itself...

All in all, a great book, sometimes difficult to read (for a non native English reader, I thought it was harder than "Hard Times" but hey, still nowhere near "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"...) but very interesting. What is the next Dickens on my list? ;)