Audiobook Review: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens . . . read by Tim Curry

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

performed by Tim Curry

Audible

2009

My Rating

✯✯✯✯✯

Purchase from Audible

Every year at Christmastime, the Amazon audiobook company Audible releases an audiobook as a gift to its members. In 2009 that gift was a dramatic reading of A Christmas Carol by Tim Curry.

I was essentially just browsing through Audible last night, bored you might say, and hoping to find something for a reasonable price that I hadn't heard before. I couldn't even retrace the steps that eventually led me to A Christmas Carol, but as soon as I saw Tim Curry's name attached to the title, I knew, absolutely knew, that I had to have it. This is one of the best audiobook buys of my life!

I'm making the grand and likely true assumption that 99% of the people who will ever read this review have watched, read, or listened to a version of A Christmas Carol sometime in their life. So I'm not going to bother with a synopsis.

This reading is all about how a single man is able to elevate a story from being merely narrated to nearly dramatized. Tim Curry is his own cast. He is now and always has been a masterful stage and screen presence, mostly due to his voice which renders the audience awestruck and dumbfounded by its nuances. A voice that lives up to each and every single expectation you might have of him in his performance of A Christmas Carol.

Exquisite shivers creep up and down the spine during Marley's interlude with Scrooge. You warm your toes at Bob Cratchit's fire and tenderly run a hand through Tiny Tim's hair. You quake with Scrooge as he awakens to the realization that no one will mourn him at his passing. And your heels may tap just lightly on the floor when Scrooge awakens to realize it is Christmas morning and he has been given a second chance.

This reading is glorious! It is alive and ripe with a multitude of voices and inflections and tones, all from the talented throat of one man . . . Tim Curry. He in no way over-dramatizes or embellishes the story, but merely lets his voice carry these characters through to their conclusion. He breathes life into Dickens' characters in a way that I never dreamed possible.

This is one audiobook that I recommend with all my heart! ❤