It Was the Best of Listens, It Was the Worst of Faculty Meetings
I finished this one during Principal Martinez's end-of-quarter budget presentation. Fifteen hours and thirty-two minutes of Dickens, spread across lakefront walks with Denise, late-night grading sessions, and yes, that interminable meeting about printer cartridge allocations. (Sorry, Martinez. Madame Defarge was knitting names into her register. I had priorities.)
Look, here's the thing about A Tale of Two Cities: it's the Dickens novel people think they know because of that opening line. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" - sure, everyone can quote it. But how many people actually push through the dense fog of Dickens' prose to get to Sydney Carton's final sacrifice? Not enough. And that's where audiobooks become genuinely redemptive for classic literature.
Paul Adams and the Art of Dickensian Patience
Paul Adams narrates this at exactly the pace Dickens intended - which is to say, deliberately. Almost meditatively. My students would absolutely hate this. They'd be reaching for that 2x speed button before we even got to the storming of the Bastille. But the narrator understands that pause is punctuation, and Dickens wrote sentences that need room to breathe.
Adams brings a warmth to the narration that surprised me. His Sydney Carton carries this weight of wasted potential - you can hear the dissolution in his voice, the self-loathing that makes his eventual redemption so devastating. And his Madame Defarge? Genuinely chilling. There's a coldness there, a revolutionary fervor that feels less like acting and more like channeling. The contrast between these two characters - one destroying himself through apathy, the other through zealotry - comes through in Adams' voice work in ways that reading on the page might miss.
That said, I've seen some listeners complain about the pacing being slow. And honestly? They're not wrong, technically. This is a 15-hour commitment, and Dickens wasn't exactly known for brevity. There are sections - particularly the early chapters establishing the Manette household - where the audiobook feels like it's wading through Victorian molasses. But here's what I tell my students about Dickens: the man was paid by the word, serialized in magazines, and writing for an audience that didn't have Netflix competing for their attention. The prose deserves to be savored, even when it tests your patience.
What Dickens Is Really Saying (And Why It Still Matters)
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about prose being architecture, not interior decoration. Dickens builds something here - a parallel structure between London and Paris, between oppression and revolution, between sacrifice and selfishness. The audiobook format actually helps you catch the rhythms of his parallelism in ways that reading might not. When Adams delivers that famous opening, you hear how each clause balances against its opposite. It's not just pretty writing. It's structural.
And the themes? Still devastatingly relevant. I listened to the tribunal scenes - where the revolutionary courts condemn people based on family connections and old grievances - while grading essays about social media mob justice. My students think cancel culture is new. Dickens was writing about it in 1859, just with more guillotines.
The Carton-Darnay dynamic is where the novel really earns its emotional weight, though. Two men who look alike, love the same woman, and represent completely different responses to their circumstances. Adams differentiates them beautifully - Darnay with this earnest, almost naive nobility, Carton with that sardonic edge that barely conceals his self-destruction. By the time we reach that final scene - "It is a far, far better thing" - I was walking along Lake Michigan with actual tears threatening. Denise asked if I was okay. I blamed the wind.
Fair Warning: This Isn't Beach Reading
Let's be real for a second. This is not an easy listen. The production quality is solid - clear audio, no distracting background noise that I noticed - but the source material is dense Victorian prose. If you loved Great Expectations or Oliver Twist in audiobook form, this is their darker, more politically complex sibling. If you bounced off Dickens in high school English (and I've watched enough students do exactly that), the audiobook might help, but it won't perform miracles.
The 15-hour runtime is substantial. I'd recommend breaking it into chunks - maybe by the original serialized "books" that Dickens wrote. Don't try to marathon this. Let it marinate.
The Verdict
Worth pausing the faculty meeting for. Absolutely.
Paul Adams delivers a performance that honors Dickens' language while making it accessible to modern ears. Is it the definitive Tale of Two Cities audiobook? I honestly couldn't find enough comparison points to say definitively - Adams isn't as widely discussed as some narrators, which is a shame. But based on this performance, he understands that great narration is interpretation, not just recitation.
If you've been meaning to finally read this classic - or if you read it in high school and remember nothing but that opening line and something about knitting - this is your chance. The prose deserves to be heard aloud. Dickens wrote for an audience that gathered to listen to stories read by firelight. We've just upgraded to earbuds and lakefront paths.
My 47 podcast listeners are getting a Dickens episode next month. Mom, try to stay awake for this one.
