I guess you could say I'm a tad disappointed with this. For some odd reason over quarantine, I became obsessed with collecting Charles Dickens' work (despite having never read anything by him until now), and now I have a ridiculous amount of 600+ page classics that I have no idea when I'll get to.

This little collection of short ghost stories is hard for me to review. I found Dickens' writing to be hard to read in the beginning, but as I read, each story became easier for me to digest than the one before it. I don't know if this is purely because I was getting the hang of his writing, or if the stories were just getting more and more digestible, but I almost didn't understand anything in the first story and I adored the last story. I definitely think The Trial for Murder was the best story in this collection. It was the easiest to read and the most suspenseful for me. To Be Read at Dusk, I think was the weakest.

Something I noticed about these stories is that I had a really difficult time visualising the scenery of the stories. As if the writing wasn't difficult enough for me to understand, I could hardly even picture the scenes that made up each story. Again, this got easier as I continued to read, so I'm not sure if the last story was written the most clearly of if I just got used to it, but my experience definitely became more enjoyable as my reading went on.

I'm really glad I started here with Dickens. Even though I didn't love this like I wanted to, I think it was valuable for me to ease my way into his work with 15 page long stories, rather than jumping in to David Copperfield, which is around 900 pages long. Now that I have a grasp on the type of writer Charles Dickens is, I think I won't be so taken aback when I jump into one of his full length novels.