My favorite book

I read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens every year (at least I try very hard to!). I got an early start because I only have snippets of time to read during the semester. I am so thankful that this book was free on the iPhone, else I would have to look everywhere to dredge up a copy (I left mine at home!).
I forget throughout the course of the year just how brilliantly written this is. Yes, the plot is amazing as well, but I gather new nuances into Scrooge's character every year, new imagery (Ghost of Christmas Past...I hardly knew ye!), new insight into this beloved (and over-told) story.
I have parts of this book memorized. Not large parts, but lines nonetheless. I think this is due in part to my childhood (well...not so much childhood as lifelong) obsesion with A Muppet Christmas Carol, to my knowledge the most faithful adaptation of the story, down to Belle (as her husband in another scene calls her) leaving Scrooge. So many stage renditions I've seen give her an angry disposition, some extreme passion, sobbing, yelling. Dickens paints the picture of a woman who is tired, so very tired, of sitting by watching her beloved change, to watch his gaze turn from her to a golden idol. He describes her as "looking mildly, but with steadiness upon him" she is decided. She is not jealous, she is not angry, she is tired. And she knows what must be done.
The next scene shows her approximately seven years before the fateful Christmas Ebenezer goes on his journey through the past, present and future (her husband describes Marley as close to death and earlier in the book Scrooge explains his partner died seven years ago that very Christmas Eve night). The room is so full of children running around causing mischeif, and her daughter is the very picture of what a father would hope to have. She is so very happy, and without Scrooge. This, not the memory of being lonely in the schoolhouse, not the memory of seeing his dearly departed sister nor the memory of his loss of Belle, seeing this is what causes Scrooge to be overcome, seeing how happy he could have been is what causes him to physically struggle with the ghost the ghost of HIS past (symbolism? imagery? both???) and put the cap upon his head in an attempt to drown out the light.

"He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a face, in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.
" ' Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!'
"In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge observed that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head."

I love this book. Give it a revisit this season if you have a mind to.

**Edit**
While searching for some information about the life of Dickens as he wrote this book (in six weeks, no less) I came across his original manuscript as archived and annotated by the New York Times. I love seeing the way authors change their works over time! It gives me hope that my book will not be as abysmal as it currently appears!