a book
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens · 2003 · 293 pages
recommended by 17 people
sourced from public statements
Ryan Holiday
“I remember very vividly going to the store Priceless with my parents as a kid and they let me pick out one book from the Great Illustrated Classics series each time. I think they were like $1.99 or $2.99 each? Anyway, I read basically the whole series book by book as a kid and it was an amazing introduction not just to reading but to really good stories and books. Robinson Crusoe. The Jungle Book. Tale of Two Cities. Huckleberry Finn. It was great. It was only later that I realized just how edited and different the books actually were. For instance, Tale of Two Cities does NOT begin with "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." But anyway, I just bought the whole set for my newborn on eBay and am already starting again.”↗
Elizabeth Warren
“‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’ Yeah, I know we all learned it in high school, but even now, when the world seems runaway, I recite the beginning of the sentence and think of upheaval, the French Revolution, love and sacrifice – and it all seems more manageable.”↗
Chris Pine
“I love Dickens. I read Bleak House when I was like 14, and it always stayed with me. I hadn’t read Dickens since. And Tale of Two Cities I thought was going to be some giant book—which it’s actually not. He’s the master of the run-on sentence and the parenthetical, but also, he’s so fucking funny—still. Just like Mark Twain. But also, Tale of Two Cities is so relevant to America right now. I think we all need to read this book, because this is about how revolutions happen and how ugly they are. What happens when the middle class dies.”↗
Maya Angelou
“Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.”↗
Dean Koontz
“Both cities in this classic are portrayed with Dickens’s talent for detail. His Paris in revolution is chilling. Madame Defarge is one of the great monsters of literature. The last scene and final sentence are deeply moving, as is the author’s insistence that totalitarian politics doesn’t have the power to eradicate love from the world.”↗
Amy Poehler
“When stories become iconic, you sometimes forget what made them so special in the first place. They can become the punch line to a joke. But A Tale of Two Cities not only has the best first line ever written—’It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’—it’s got everything! The novel has wine, guillotines, revolution! It has the storming of the Bastille! It has Madame Defarge, one of the best villains in any literary novel. At the end, it’s got a little romantic switcheroo: One man stands in the place of another and dies for the woman he loves. The first line is fitting right now. It’s a very have and have-not time. It’s certainly the most hopeful period for our country but also a very bleak one for a lot of people.”↗
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