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.
By Charles Dickens
Welcome to the twenty second novel in the Chapter By Chapter review series. Also, while this is usually a weekly offering, for this last week before Christmas I’m doing this book all week, all five chapters (or “staves” as this book calls them), while trying to finish Captain Yuletide. This should be an easy book to track down, being in public domain. If you prefer a physical book there’s the library and it’s probably available in book stories, but a free eBook version can be found on Project Guttenberg, where I’m getting mine from, Google Books, the Internet Archive, and that’s just the sources I know.
This will be my first time reading this book outside of an excerpt in a pamphlet that’s part of my Christmas decorations. Like most of you I have also seen numerous adaptations and homages. I even saw one where Rich Little, a famous impersonator back in my day, played every role as a different celebrity. There’s also an animated version in the Christmas Specials playlist and a riff by Linkara of one of the live-action versions as well. I’ve seen Scrooge be played by Mister Magoo, Michael Cain, the fittingly chosen Scrooge McDuck, and numerous other animated versions over the years, and I think there’s something about the animated ones that really got the ghosts properly spooky, including the one from my youth I’m still hoping to track down someday. With so many adaptations live and animated that’s not an easy task when you’re trying to do other things in your life.
With that, it’s time to start the review, with a line that I find unintentionally amusing as an opening line, which is kind of mean considering the line.
