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catching up
Mar. 26th, 2011 07:45 pmI think I've mentioned before that there's a shocking amount of Stuff Everyone Has Read that I've never read. I feel like I've got a vague familiarity with a lot of it, on account of my parents' having taught high school English for more than thirty years apiece, but a lot of the stuff that everyone had to read in high school I didn't have to because we happened to be assigned different things; and a lot of the stuff that everyone (for different values of "everyone", though) chose to read in late junior high and high school, I never did, because a) I wasn't there in sixth grade when everyone was really getting going on the classics, and b) I was powerfully turned off, at the age of thirteen, by Dickens and his Too Many Words and by Mary Shelley and that wretched Frankenstein.
So there's a fair amount of stuff where it's pretty startling, but I've never actually read a word of it. Moby Dick? Ishmael. Ahab. Pequod. Whale. [shrug] The Scarlet Letter? Hester. Chillingworth. Dimmesdale. Letter. Pearl. Scaffold. (Or, if you're looking at the film version, apparently, Demi Moore and Gary Oldman run off together and live happily ever after?) I never read any Austen or any of the Brontes as a teenager; I knew Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility from their various film adaptations, but it wasn't until I was about twenty-five and a friend's mother somehow learned that I'd never read it and was so horrified that she stopped what she was doing, ordered me into the car, and drove me to the bookstore to buy a copy, that I actually read P&P. (I have since read most of S&S, most of Emma, and all of Persuasion, but not begun either of the ones named after houses.) And I had a course in 18th and 19th century British literature in college, in which Wuthering Heights was on the syllabus, but I was sick the week we read it, so on the exam where we were to answer any six of the seven questions, I answered the ones that weren't about Wuthering Heights and that was that. (I have seen bits of the movie in that case, but not the whole thing, I don't think. I don't know why I always feel that Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff should at some point stand out on the moor and look up at Catherine's window and yell "Stellaaaaaaaaa!!!")
Anyway, this week at my brother and sister-in-law's house, more than twenty years after everyone I know, I picked up Jane Eyre (of which I hear there is also a new movie, incidentally). I think I took a shot at it when I was eleven or twelve and never really got past the first or second page, but now I'm reading along at a decent clip. (I do know that as a kid I'd have been frustrated by the untranslated French - though I imagine most print editions include translation in the footnotes, only I'm reading a Project Gutenberg edition on my iPhone, so it's a good thing I can read the French for myself.) It's a bit ... much, isn't it? I mean, one knew it would be, but my goodness.
So I imagine Wuthering Heights, when I get to it, is going to knock my socks off.
Still, though, young Jane says, "He made me love him without looking at me." I get it, you know? I mean: Oh, Jane; but at the same time, oh, honey. (So there's another thing I wouldn't have appreciated at eleven. Maybe it would have been better if I'd read it then after all. :-) )
So there's a fair amount of stuff where it's pretty startling, but I've never actually read a word of it. Moby Dick? Ishmael. Ahab. Pequod. Whale. [shrug] The Scarlet Letter? Hester. Chillingworth. Dimmesdale. Letter. Pearl. Scaffold. (Or, if you're looking at the film version, apparently, Demi Moore and Gary Oldman run off together and live happily ever after?) I never read any Austen or any of the Brontes as a teenager; I knew Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility from their various film adaptations, but it wasn't until I was about twenty-five and a friend's mother somehow learned that I'd never read it and was so horrified that she stopped what she was doing, ordered me into the car, and drove me to the bookstore to buy a copy, that I actually read P&P. (I have since read most of S&S, most of Emma, and all of Persuasion, but not begun either of the ones named after houses.) And I had a course in 18th and 19th century British literature in college, in which Wuthering Heights was on the syllabus, but I was sick the week we read it, so on the exam where we were to answer any six of the seven questions, I answered the ones that weren't about Wuthering Heights and that was that. (I have seen bits of the movie in that case, but not the whole thing, I don't think. I don't know why I always feel that Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff should at some point stand out on the moor and look up at Catherine's window and yell "Stellaaaaaaaaa!!!")
Anyway, this week at my brother and sister-in-law's house, more than twenty years after everyone I know, I picked up Jane Eyre (of which I hear there is also a new movie, incidentally). I think I took a shot at it when I was eleven or twelve and never really got past the first or second page, but now I'm reading along at a decent clip. (I do know that as a kid I'd have been frustrated by the untranslated French - though I imagine most print editions include translation in the footnotes, only I'm reading a Project Gutenberg edition on my iPhone, so it's a good thing I can read the French for myself.) It's a bit ... much, isn't it? I mean, one knew it would be, but my goodness.
So I imagine Wuthering Heights, when I get to it, is going to knock my socks off.
Still, though, young Jane says, "He made me love him without looking at me." I get it, you know? I mean: Oh, Jane; but at the same time, oh, honey. (So there's another thing I wouldn't have appreciated at eleven. Maybe it would have been better if I'd read it then after all. :-) )
