There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry Emily Dickinson, 1894
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about some of my favorite fiction books. In order to be fair, I should also blog a bit about some of the so-called literary classics. By the 7th or 8th grade, my friend June and I had read most of the English and American “classics,” along with many of the Russian novels. Looking first at English literature, I still think Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is one of the best of all time! Who can ever forget that opening line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”? Remember the bloodthirsty, infamous Madame DaFarge knitting the names of the victims of the French Revolution into her knitting patterns. When we were in Paris a couple of years ago, we saw the site where the many guillotine executions took place. What a sad time in French history.
One of my other favorite English classics is Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I was never too much into her sister, Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre; she always seemed a bit insipid to me. In American Literature, I always really like Nathaniel Hawthorne! I have warned you from time to time that I am somewhat strange. I really like The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. In fact on my first Master’s Degree I actually did my master’s thesis on Hawthorne. Who can forget the sad and somewhat mysterious Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter or the cursed Pyncheon family in The House of the Seven Gables? One of my hobbies is genealogy, and perhaps learning how many of my ancestors lived in both New England and Philadelphia in the 1600’s accounts for some of my interest in the stories of this era in American history.
The House of the Seven Gables, Salem, MA
There are so many great novels in world literature that it is simply impossible to even begin to mention them all! There is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and on and on! Incidentally, Conrad was Polish, but he taught himself English by reading newspapers and wrote his novels in English, quite an accomplishment!
I’ve also read, or was forced to read, pretty well all of the famous Russian Novels. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is sort of an interminable bore, but his novel Anna Karina is much better in my opinion. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is quite good! I also like his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, although it is pretty deep.
George Eliot
Oh so many moons ago when I taught high school English, we had a very prescribed curriculum we were expected to follow. The poor sophomores had to read George Eliot’s novel of Victorian England, Silas Marner. Now I have to tell you that I hated that novel (and still do, I might add), and really had to psyche myself up to teach it. If you want to inculcate a love of reading into young people, I’m not sure Silas Marner is quite the way to do it! My only sympathy for George Eliot, her nom de plume, was that as a woman writing in the mid 1800’s, she couldn’t publish under her own name of Mary Ann Evans, so she had to adopt the more acceptable male pen name.
For my junior students, they had to read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, a novel of a somewhat cowardly Union soldier during the American Civil War, or the War Between the States, as it is more properly called. Crane is a bit better than Eliot, but not by much! I also managed to get myself into hot water with my school principal and the Fort Worth School Board because I also had my junior students ready J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Salinger’s novel of teenagers coming of age had way too much bad language and sexual innuendo for conservative Fort Worth in those days!
Maybe that is why getting to teach A Tale of Two Cities to the seniors was such a breath of fresh air to me. I could actually work with a book that I personally liked and admired! It had history, adventure, and a memorable cast of characters.
I started this post with a famous quote from the American poetess, Emily Dickinson. The wonderful thing about reading is that, no matter what your preferences might be, immersing yourself into a book can literally transport you to a different time and place, without ever having to leave the comfort of your own home!
©The Eclectic Grandma, 2017
