And It Only Took Me a Decade
I finally finished reading The Canterbury Tales, purchased for high school English IV. My cheap paperback copy is yellowed with age; it looks like it actually is from the Middle Ages. It feels like I have been reading it since the Middle Ages.
It's kind of a relief. That book has followed me for years, taunting me, demanding to be read, tormenting me everywhere I went. It accompanied me from my parents' house to my first apartment...and to the second apartment I moved into three weeks later when it turned out the first apartment was a crime-ridden, death-courting cesspool...and then back to my parents' house...and then to the next apartment...and then back to my parents' house...and finally to my current house. My parents thought they would never be rid of me; I thought I would never be rid of that accursed book. It was a millstone around my neck. Inescapable. Omnipresent.
It haunted my dreams.
Ironically, I actually finished it in my parents' house. Perhaps the book wished for its journey to end where it first began. Though in truth, I never actually had read beyond the first couple of pages, until I read it all at once. I know it's a great work of literature and all...it's just...it's, um, boring.
As for my English class, I'm still trying to figure out what the purpose of that was. We focused for weeks and maybe even months on the prologue, analyzing every word and every nuance and researching all the great contextual meaning that is hidden to us but supposedly would have been so clear to a reader of its time. At some point, I figure, a book has lost all its value except as a historical artifact if you can't appreciate even a quarter of its content it without extensive research. After all of that, I guess I knew all about how utterly scandalous the Prioress was. But gosh, since we never got beyond the prologue, there was still an entire book that I knew nothing about.
And now I do.
Eh. I could have done without it. At least it's finally done and gone.
So I've started a new book. Uncle Tom's Cabin. It bears a sticker indicating that it was purchased from a small family-owned bookstore...that was run out of business by the big boxes, oh, sometime around 1996.
Thus continues my tour o' literature a la death march....
3 comments:
I can't believe your AP English class was able to use a translated version. In my AP class, we had to read the original middle-English and translate it.
Hmm, I never did get that English class. The only thing I liked about was the poems we read throughout the year. Do you remember that crazy paper we (you) wrote about the red and black in Macbeth?
Ags: No, we had to read and translate the prologue in Middle English. Which meant that I went out and bought the modern English translation. Like, duh. ;)
TX Girl: I do remember that paper. It was my masterpiece of B.S. I think I ought to publish it.
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