Book: Silas Marner
Feb. 16th, 2018 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amediaEveryone is supposed to hate Silas Marner, because it used to be required reading in school. I wasn't required to read it as a kid, but I did and I loved it then--and now.
I didn't actually read it for school back then. Rather, I inherited an English lit book from one of my siblings and picked out the stories and whatnot that sounded interesting, and it included an abridged version of Silas Marner. I didn't realize I was supposed to hate it, so I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.
A couple of months ago, I was looking for something soothing to read. I reread a bunch of Jane Austen novels and restarted Emma, and realized I found early-book-Emma too irksome to be soothing. Then I remembered that I've always intended to read Middlemarch one of these days, so I found a Kindle collection of George Eliot for 99 cents and downloaded that, and Y HALO THAR my old pal Silas! So I read the unabridged version.
I think the abridged version left out a lot of the really interesting discussions of religious ideas and some of the more abstract material on the effects of industrialization on rural England. But I still loved the story and was surprised to see how much I vividly remembered.
I didn't actually read it for school back then. Rather, I inherited an English lit book from one of my siblings and picked out the stories and whatnot that sounded interesting, and it included an abridged version of Silas Marner. I didn't realize I was supposed to hate it, so I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.
A couple of months ago, I was looking for something soothing to read. I reread a bunch of Jane Austen novels and restarted Emma, and realized I found early-book-Emma too irksome to be soothing. Then I remembered that I've always intended to read Middlemarch one of these days, so I found a Kindle collection of George Eliot for 99 cents and downloaded that, and Y HALO THAR my old pal Silas! So I read the unabridged version.
I think the abridged version left out a lot of the really interesting discussions of religious ideas and some of the more abstract material on the effects of industrialization on rural England. But I still loved the story and was surprised to see how much I vividly remembered.
