My Date with Dickens

This weekend I spent 5/6 of my awake hours on my bed, listening to Mozart, Yann Tiersen, Nobuo Uematsu, and the such, reading the highly acclaimed Tale of Two Cities.
What A Masterpiece.
I had tried to get into it for years at a time ever since 9th grade. But now, thank goodness, it's finished-- another paperback back on the shelf tucked neatly between my volume of The Lord of The Rings and Pride and Prejudice (yeah, I know, I have a very generic book collection...)

There was a phase that I was going through earlier, and it was this: I never read anything unless it was assigned. Not even newspapers or magazines-- not even candy bar rappers to see if they contained palm oil-- not even (heaven forbid) the Bible (with the exception of weekly Bible memory). I lived in this kind of empty void where words on a page were just the predecessor (if i may use the term correctly) of a good grade; and if I understood the words or not was simply irrelevant. I even went to a bookstore with my parents to see if I could get myself out of this phase, (yes, I knew what was happening to me, and I felt helpless in making it go away) but nothing worked. No books drew me to them. They were all just empty pages.
I was quite terrified.
I was quite illiterate.

I think I can accredit my salvation from this state to none other than Charles Dickens himself. Okay, so it was assigned as a classic... But still. These were words that moved me, that meant something. And I payed attention to them. Thus, my exiting from that horrible phase, into the FRIGGIN AWESOME!! world of words.
So now I think I might venture to tackle Les Miserables or David Copperfield. Maybe I'm just too confident now.