This classic is much more readable than I remember it being in high school. Overall, I think it still holds up. The themes are well-executed and largely timeless.

However there are a few things that I want to take some time to consider more deeply, not necessarily as negatives, but because they do affect my reading of the book in the modern day. The first is that while Dickens clearly sympathizes with the people of France who were driven to revolution, he chose a (albeit disavowed) aristocrat as his protagonist and revolutionaries as his antagonist. This seems to speak a bit to his audience as while as how it can be difficult, even with good intentions, to write about these historical events in a way that avoid the risks of extending fear of the specific terror to anything one metaphorically links to them. The other is that to my modern eyes it seems clear that Sydney Carton is clinically depressed. This brings about some disturbing implications about how and when the book judges his life to have meaning and/or worth, especially when compared to his double's.