I'd never read it before, and wanted to experience the original unintermediated by film. My impressions: Dickens accomplished a HELL of a lot here in only 73 pages. Today's mercilessly deconstructed authors could go back to this dense style and I wouldn't mind a bit.

What you get in the book that you don't in the movies is Dickens' evocation (not quite construction, but almost) of what we now think of as a traditional Christmas. His descriptions of the holiday as celebrated in London and in Scrooge's nephew's house have been the basis and the aspirations of the December celebrations of the entire English-speaking world ever since. Would he have been happy with how this had turned out over 100 years later? Who can say?