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[thatgreekgirl]

why don't i understand nathaniel hawthorne?

kids read him in high school, and every time i pick up scarlet letter, i don't understand it, and have to put it back down.

it really gets on my nerves.

Comments

[37trogdors]

I loved AP Lit and high school English classes, and had a separate readership program with my teachers than the other students with extra essays for no credit (a la Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I read after the fact and adored the similarity between us) and never, ever, ever liked Scarlet Letter. I "got" it but it never spoke to me that so many other books did. I thought it was crap; other said it was there favorite.

It was always Babbitt, Sun Also Rises, Streetcar, Death of a Salesman, and Watership Down for me. Billy Budd, The Old Man and the Sea, and Scarlet Letter can suck it.

[37trogdors]

"their" favorite: not entirely sober.

[thatgreekgirl]

don't hate on hemingway.

the kicker to me is, poe wrote around the same time, and uses similar language, but his words make sense to me in the first reading almost every single time. not like n.h. where i have to read a paragraph 3 times to know for sure what he said.

[37trogdors]

I'm not hating on Hemingway, I just said Sun Also Rises : (. I love Hemingway.

Also, I 'get' Poe too in a quick and enjoyable manner and see where you're coming from. But then there's some like Billy Budd... Ugh, okay, I see the 'hidden' homoeroticism scarcely concealed, I get the religious sacrifice angle, I get the critique of British justice within the armed forces and the inability to distinguish ally from enemy and how humanity is lost when left to its own devices with misplaced trust and ugh. It's there, I see, but it's written in a poor manner that isn't as timeless as it wants to be, it's required without true merit. Yeah, just because there's meat on the bone not shoved in your face like in a Dan Brown novel doesn't mean it's worth looking for to discover some life lesson