"And the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction" (Dickens 23).
I'm not going to lie, reading the beginning of the book proved to be difficult for me. It was tough to get through in a reasonable amount of time and I had no idea what I was reading at points. Regardless of the struggle, I powered through, optimistic that it could only get better. And guess what!? It did. A Tale of Two Cities is slow to start but once I got a little ways in, I found that I was able to follow the story with all its twists and turns. One of my favorite parts of the book was the motif of blood and wine because Dickens used the two terms almost interchangeably even if he really meant the other. In my mind they came to mean the same thing. Another thing I enjoyed about the book was the endnotes. I am a fan of history so I was constantly flipping to the back of the book in order to understand the references Dickens made. Another thing i struggled with was predictions. No matter what, the book never went in the direction that I had guessed. Well, I guess that is not completely true because I predicted that Lucie and Darnay would end up together and (spoiler alert) they did. I also predicted that something terrible was going to happen to Carton but I did not know specifically. The struggle between Miss Pross and Madam Defarge is an example of an outcome I did not see coming. All in all I think it was important for me to read this book even though it was not my favorite because it was a great book for analysis. When I would reread sections with the intent of finding quotes, I would sometimes come back with a detail I had not noticed before.