Bah! Humbug.

Trying mightily to enjoy Les Standiford's "The Man Who Saved Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits,"  but I'm gonna say this: It reads pretty much like a Wikipedia article.

They turned the book into a movie, it seems:

Maybe it's good. And it might be, as it appears they've taken liberties with what Standiford wrote, incorporating bits of the actual book into the actual book (which Standiford's publishers tried by including "A Christmas Carol" under the same cover).

But I'll admit reading the book (Standiford's, not Dickens') I'm hard-pressed to see how anyone thought turning it into a movie would be a good idea. It's informatively dull and -- inexplicably -- leaves out the Muppet adaptation of the story as adaptations of the story are discussed.

I appreciate the factual approach. But it makes for dull reading.

Where it piqued my interest, ironically, was in its discussion of the piratical approach to authors' works at the time -- with no international copyright laws in place, nothing stopped Americans, for example, of printing A Christmas Carol, even under Dickens' name, and pocketing the profits, just as it profited British publishers from printing the work of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe without sending a penny across the Atlantic. Seems others making parasitical living off the artistry of others isn't a new thing.