The Chimes

by Charles Dickens

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Plot:A poor man tries to make an honest living. One night he has a dream about dying and being shown the future by the spirits who live in the bell tower of a church. Things work out fine.

This story was written by Dickens because he was required to write another holiday story as part of a contract with a new publisher. It shows. The story feels rushed in some places (he wrote it in mere months, with a strict deadline) and lacks the overall charm typical of a Dickens piece. Unlike A Christmas Carol, no lessons are learned here and no one lives their lives differently because of the spirits. It simply shows some unfortunate things that COULD have happened, had the poor characters taken the advice of the rich characters. But none of the poor people in the story were likely to have actually taken the advice of the rich people to begin with. It's all just some silly dream.
     The tone is preachy. I know Dickens always had a message in his stories and it's impossible to ignore that message when reading. But he was usually able to straddle the thin line between getting his point across and still being entertaining. It's not a bad story, but had he taken some more time to smooth things over, build characters a little less obviously, and slow down the pace, this could have jumped back on that aforementioned line and been a truly great story.

All Things Bright and Beautiful

by James Herriot

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Plot: The adventures and misadventures of a newly-wed country vet.


This book is a sequel to All Creatures Great and Small which I have also read and quite enjoyed. I didn't like this one as much as its predecessor, but it was still a good read. Like the first book, this one is a compilation of humorous and/or emotional stories from James Herriot's real life. While All Creatures Great and Small took place between the time that he first joined the country practice fresh out of vet school until he married, All Things Bright and Beautiful picks up shortly after his marriage and contains stories from then until he leaves to serve in WWII. The author deftly avoids mentioning the war except where necessary and focuses all his attention on the day-to-day mishaps and wonders of the practice.

Overall, the book is good. Not life-changing, hardly thought-provoking, just a light-hearted snippet of life. I do look forward to reading the rest of the series someday but the reason I gave 3 stars rather then 4 is because I would not recommend this book to everyone. Only for those with a real love for animals and who can handle the surgery scenes without losing their lunch.

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

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Plot: A family with five daughters trained in mortal combat live in Regency England, which has been over-run with zombies. When the girls aren't sending the damned souls back to the fires of Hell, they're trying to find husbands.


Let me start off by saying that before reading this book I had never read Pride and Prejudice or anything else written by Jane Austen, nor do I plan to without it having been improved by the addition of zombies or sea monsters or whatnot. From what I gather, all her stories are about silly girls chasing after guys in Regency England. In other words: pointless and boring. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is equally pointless, but at least it's not boring.

I didn't really start caring about the characters until about the middle of the book, when Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth (and she beats the shit out of him.) The only reason I continued reading past page 50 or so was for the zombie scenes. I'm glad I did, though. The ending is superb, and I say that as a person who hates happy endings. There are no happy endings in life; everyone dies eventually.

Aside from Austen's basic flawed plot concept, the only thing I can really complain about is how the revisions were added. I found myself continually looking for the seams in the story - trying to separate the original story from the zombie mayhem. On a superficial level, it was easy (probably too easy, sometimes it felt like Seth Grahame-Smith was trying too hard to stick in a zombie reference), but in some areas I puzzled over what had been omitted, and was distracted from the novel as it stands. Hopefully, it's just me having not read the original and being a little too nerdy for my own good, rather than a fundamental flaw in the writing style. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to answer that for you; you'll have to read the book to find out for yourself.