I've finally finished Wuthering Heights! If you read my other blog, you know that this has been a HUGE week for me, so the fact that I also managed to finish this in the last few days is a pretty big feat. I've just had SO much going on lately that it took me a lot longer to read this than it normally would have.
This was a wonderful novel! It is very dark, but it is still a great romance. It is a tale of a love that is so intense it destroys all those it touches...pretty amazing stuff! Heathcliff, devil that he is, still manages to win the sympathy of the reader in his love and heartache for Catherine.
I find it very sad that this is Emily Brontë's only novel (or at least, the only one that survives). It is a classic, and a good read! It is beautifully haunting, and I will eventually re-read it, and hopefully at a somewhat faster pace next time. I feel like some of the intensity got lost in the length of time it took me to read it. I'd read a few chapters and then have to put it off for a while before picking it up again, and I rather think it would have been even better if I'd been able to read it in a more compact time frame. At any rate, I very highly recommend it! If you have trouble with reading accents, check out the link I put in my last post. It was a great help in interpreting Joseph's extreme Yorkshire dialect.
Next up: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, a mystery. The cover and title caught my eye, and the description sounds delightful! It is the winner of the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award, and I'm just really looking forward to reading it! I imagine that it'll go a bit faster than Wuthering Heights...we shall see!
Happy reading! :-D
Showing posts with label Emily Brontë. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emily Brontë. Show all posts
Friday, October 9, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Wuthering Heights, continued
I'm about half-way through Wuthering Heights. In the midst of moving and arranging my new place and taking on a full-time job, I haven't had as much time to read as I'd like, but I'm picking up pace again.
Wuthering Heights has a great story so far, but one of the characters, Joseph, is written with an accent so terribly thick that it is difficult to understand, and his passages are quite long, since he's a pompous, long-winded religious fanatic. I can't bear to skip over his parts, even though they're often explained later, so even when I've got time to read, some parts have been a struggle to get through.
I found a great resource today, though:
http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/josephspeech.htm
This site takes all of the major passages wherein Joseph speaks and follows them with an easy-to-read translation. I'll probably still try to figure out the strong Yorkshire accent, but I'm glad to have this to reference, and I wanted to pass it on to anybody else that might want to read this book. It really is wonderful so far!
Wuthering Heights has a great story so far, but one of the characters, Joseph, is written with an accent so terribly thick that it is difficult to understand, and his passages are quite long, since he's a pompous, long-winded religious fanatic. I can't bear to skip over his parts, even though they're often explained later, so even when I've got time to read, some parts have been a struggle to get through.
I found a great resource today, though:
http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/josephspeech.htm
This site takes all of the major passages wherein Joseph speaks and follows them with an easy-to-read translation. I'll probably still try to figure out the strong Yorkshire accent, but I'm glad to have this to reference, and I wanted to pass it on to anybody else that might want to read this book. It really is wonderful so far!
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
I decided, since the Disney bio is taking me so long, to pick up another book at the same time. I've always been a one-at-a-time reader, but I'm going to try this. Maybe when I don't feel like reading the biography, I'll feel like reading the novel instead. The novel of choice is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It is a classic and I've felt ashamed for a long time that I've not yet picked it up. I've had it on my shelf for ages, but just never got around to it. I'm going to right that wrong now :-)
I'd like to add a bit of an aside here. I've long been annoyed with the practice of people replacing curse words with the first letter (ex. "effing"). If you're going to say it, just say it. Preferably, though, don't say it at all. I'm guilty of cursing, too, but I don't like to, and while I don't take personal offense, I'd rather not hear it, either. However, I'm more bothered by people making lame attempts to mask the words than I am by the words themselves. All this sprung from something in the Editor's note in this book:
"The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent people are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does - what feeling it spares - what horror it conceals." Currer Bell (a.k.a. Charlotte Brontë)
I'd like to add a bit of an aside here. I've long been annoyed with the practice of people replacing curse words with the first letter (ex. "effing"). If you're going to say it, just say it. Preferably, though, don't say it at all. I'm guilty of cursing, too, but I don't like to, and while I don't take personal offense, I'd rather not hear it, either. However, I'm more bothered by people making lame attempts to mask the words than I am by the words themselves. All this sprung from something in the Editor's note in this book:
"The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent people are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does - what feeling it spares - what horror it conceals." Currer Bell (a.k.a. Charlotte Brontë)
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