OK, I know I almost never read books that require serious notations, but Gillen D'Arcy Wood equals EPIC FAIL. As I read this crappy Barnes and Noble paperback, I encountered three separate end notes that have pretty significant spoilers in them. By "pretty significant" I mean these events still have not happened, so they weren't, say, right there on the next page, and they're all things that seem like major plot points to me. I'm still REALLY upset about this! Everyone has to read a classic for the first time, for crying out loud. If Dickens had wanted us to be whacked over the head by the fact that such-and-such imagery was foreshadowing of so-and-so's later death, he would have just said that on the freaking page, instead of, you know, the IMAGERY AND FORESHADOWING.

And then when I was about two-thirds of the way through, I made the mistake of idly turning the book over and reading the blurb on the back. It completely ruined the entire plot. Completely. All the best things that you're supposed to realize about certain characters for yourself over the course of the novel . . . RUINED.

Other than that, what can I say that hasn't already been said. Masterful and amazing. I marked a couple of my very favorite passages. The only one I will not quote here is the entire last page of the book, which one must arrive at for oneself, having read and absorbed all the other pages immediately before.

"In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?"

"Mr Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it."

"Steeping the towels in the water, and partially wringing them out, he folded them on his head in a manner hideous to behold, sat down at the table, and said, 'Now I am ready!'"

"Two or three times, the matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it imperative on him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of damp head-gear as no words can describe; which were made the more ludicrous by his anxious gravity."

"The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours the horses in the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set down for them."

"O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a happy father's face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!"

"'Commence,' was Monsieur Defarge's not unreasonable reply, 'at the commencement.'"

"And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it."