i don't know why i didn't read this earlier, east of eden is one of my favourite books. upon realising that this is pretty much required high school reading in the US i was trying to reflect on what typical things we read at school and all i can think of is shakespeare, jane austen, what else? thomas hardy? did we ever read any novels written after 1950? now that i'm looking at the syllabus possibly some students read 'of mice and men' but i don't remember our 'texts' being very interesting or powerful. maybe my memory is being unfair. lord of the flies! i am the cheese! hmm.
i wonder if learning to analyse texts ruins those texts which are forced on you, yet sets you up to appreciate literature you choose in the future. sigh, english was not fun. at the same time i don't necessarily consciously analyse while reading if i can avoid it, i let my subconsious deal with it and then just feel a general sense of whether a book is 'deep' or not.
therefore i don't really want to go into details about this book because i thought it was really good but i don't want to expound on specifically why, there is a lot of general knowledge about this book out there but i want to enjoy it on its own without getting into that whole thing. and i don't really want to break it down into what it means, because i'd probably end up sounding horribly cliched when the whole point is that i liked the general sense of it, and that feeling you have when you imagine devastation that you have never felt in reality, but you still really feel it, that is magic and can't be described in words.
Oh, Thomas Hardy.
ReplyDeleteConfession: I never read Tess of the d'Urbervilles. And uh, i wrote on it in my year 12 exam. (and did okay!) I hated it (and english) so much.
The only text we ever analysed that I sort of enjoyed was "The Third Man"
ps. pretty sure everyone read to kill a mockingbird. but i can't think of anything else.
tess of the d'urbervilles was actually one of the really dreary descriptive books i liked, i guess there are reasons why it's a classic? i'm impressed you essayed it without reading it, but now thinking about it what are english exam essays other than memorised word constructions? ugh.
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