I chose the second story To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt by Charles Dickens. Don’t ask me why, because, with the exception of A Christmas Carol I can’t tolerate Dickens’ paid-by-the-word writing style. Maybe I felt the need to torture myself with mind-numbing prose?

If I did, I failed, because this story was delightful! Written with an economy of style I can hardly credit to Dickens, but fully fleshed out and wonderfully creepy. At 10 pages long it’s a compact ghost story about a man who sits on the jury of a murder trial, and how the victim sees to it that justice is done. It’s an unconventional follow-up to the conventional starter, and it makes me eager to find out what’s to follow. I doubt I’ll follow them in strict order, but I have high hopes that they’ll all be wroth reading, and I look forward to filling up my index card.

It has left me feeling completely flummoxed by Charles Dickens though. ( )