Hosted By Sheila @ Book Journey
It's Monday! What are you reading????? ......Reading!!!...What on Earth is Reading???
Well, I have returned to work - and how can you tell? Well, firstly you will notice that there have been no posts for about 2 weeks now and secondly you will notice that I am reading the same books as I was way back in holiday time. It is very sad :( I am aiming to get back on track now.
Am nearly finished Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, both of which I have enjoyed a great deal! Will post reviews this weekend. I have started The Perks of Being a Wallflower (which is fantastic) and The Scarlet Letter which I need to read by the end of this month for book club. I like the Scarlet Letter, but the language of the first paragraph was incredibly taxing! It seems like one of those novels where you need to read a few pages to get used to the authors language before it flows. Does anybody else have this experience? I have copied the text from the first paragraph here: Let me know what you think! Happy reading everyone!!
It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favoured the reader--inexcusably, and for no earthly reason that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine--with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous "P. P. , Clerk of this Parish," was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights or his own.
