A Tale of Two Enemies

  I have a new least favorite book this week. A Tale of Two Cities is probably one of the worst books that I have ever read. It takes him sooo much longer to say such simple things that in any other time period would only take a few words. I mean I understand that people paid the authors by the word back then, but his way of saying things is just crazy. I really just want to burn the book and have it crumble into dust. It is so boring that I've fallen asleep several times while standing up and reading it. My question is ,"Why can't our English teachers just let us read something from around this time period, so that the book is at least in the English that WE speak. Dickens' book might as well be in Latin, his words would be about as meaningful to me then as they are now. I feel as though the book and I are enemies, it trying to keep me from understanding what it contains, and I, who simply wants to read it and understand what it means so that I don't fail English class. I would understand why we would read it if I was the only one that hated it, but as far as I can tell, no one, besides those who can analyze its true meaning, so much as likes the book, yet alone wants to read it.
   So I ask once again,"Why can't we read something that was written within the last hundred years?" Seriously, what are we supposed to learn from this book? How to read Old English and its many strange spellings? Stuff that we will never use again? What can we possibly learn from this book, other than the fact that Dickens decidedly enjoys to speak in various riddles, using things such as colors and other symbols to convey his thoughts to his readers, as if he can't just come out and say something, only dance around the topic and give everyone a different impression of what he is saying. This book is now my enemy and this is war.