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lgpiper

Reading Slothfully

I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.

Currently reading

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
Jules Verne
The Spirit of the Border
Zane Grey
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
Beverly Cleary
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Ross Macdonald
Delilah of the Snows
Harold Bindloss
Mrs. Miniver
Jan Struther
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
Maud Hart Lovelace
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
The Way Some People Die
Ross Macdonald
Envy of Angels
Matt Wallace

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights - Richard J. Dunn, Emily Brontë God, this was bad. I'd read it before, many years ago, and didn't realize how lame it was. It read like it was written by a middle schooler, perhaps a goth girl, certainly no one who had any sense of human nature. I can't for the life of me understand why it has remained a literary classic. I guess it must be a favorite of depressed 13-year old girls...or something. Please, God, don't ever incline me to read this garbage again.

Part of the problem with this book was that there wasn't a single likable character in the whole novel. In fact, I don't know when I've ever read a book that has so many assholes in it. Makes you wonder what life was like at the home of parson Brontë.

Then, you had fully improbably things like women having fits of the vapors for months on end, then suddenly having babies, and no one appeared to have the slightest inkling that such a "blessed event" was likely to occur. So, rather than taking care of a pregnant women, they continued deviling them by their brutish nastiness. WTF?

In theory, love and romance figure heavily in this book, but it appears from the writing that Ms. Brontë doesn't have a clue as to what love and romance actually entail.