Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.

This is a rare occasion for me. I’m sort of starting at the beginning of the Christmas season. So I tried to figure out what I could that would fit in the allotted time. There isn’t a lot. Not counting this and Christmas day itself I only have two Mondays. A shorter book is required but nothing decent is really that short. I thought about my schedule, knowing I needed time to finish (hopefully) my Christmas superhero comic, Captain Yuletide. I actually considered using Saturday as a bonus day since I was not going to be doing “Yesterday’s” Comic until after the holiday for the same reason. That would mean STILL taking up time I need for the comic.

Then I came up with what I need, once I figured out what I’m going to read. My choice is only five “staves” long, so I could do that the last week of Christmas, free up even more time to finish my minicomic on time, and still have a Christmas themed Chapter By Chapter. That brings us to this year’s book of choice. The Life And Adventures Of Santa Claus is one I’d like to read but that would take up all of December and I’m not prepared to give up the whole month and still lose out. I’ll have to figure out how to tackle that in the future. Other choices are children’s books and thus really short. I’m not sure how to tackle them. Then I checked into my first choice and found it’s rather easy to do even though the chapters are a bit long. I can auto-schedule them for Christmas week and not worry about them. So this year, and for the twenty-second book in the Chapter By Chapter review series, it’s time for a timeless classic that’s been adapted, homaged, sequeled, and re-imagined to death and yet rarely gets as old as its protagonist. Set your clocks for midnight because we’re reading…

A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas

By Charles Dickens

I don’t think I have to go into the history of this story to anyone old enough to bother reading this website. If you haven’t seen this story, it’s on purpose. There are whole websites dedicated to listing all the adaptations of this classic. At least one of your favorite shows have some kind of take on it over the years. A friend and I used to do a “comedy” show on tape (there’s a few scattered episodes around here somewhere, and I will not be posting them anywhere) and we did a special lame adaptation that proves neither of us were Rich Little (a better fake celebrity Christmas Carol adaptation and probably what inspired our garbage). Comics have done it. Radio dramas. Other books. TV. Movies. Probably video games. Theater. The odds are you know this story.

How many of you have read the original? Best I’ve done is a novelty pamphlet excerpt that’s part of my Christmas decorations. So this year I’m going to fix that and read the whole thing. Like I stated earlier, this is going to take up all of Christmas week, Reading along will be easy this time. I’m using the version posted at Project Guttenberg, with illustrations by John Leech, but being public domain means there are a number of ebook sites that have it for free, or you can get the physical copy at any bookseller or just borrow it from the local library that week if you can. Internet Archive may even have it. So we can all finally read this book.

Charles Dickens should also not be a stranger to you. Many of his other works have also had adaptations. We were forced to read Great Expectations, which was a surprisingly decent read for me. He’s also done Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield (not to be confused with the magician), and other Christmas stories you may not even realize. I even did a video review of one adaptation, Cricket On The Hearth. In hindsight I should have looked into that one because of the review but maybe some other year if I’m still doing this. It’s only three really long chapters instead of five, but I’ve already written all of this so I’m not trashing it now.

So no book review next week but join me in two weeks when Chapter By Chapter takes over Christmas week to see the original meeting between Ebenezer Scrooge and his new ghostly best friends. This should be fun.