Reading the Classics Again

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to start reading the classics again, now, just for the sheer pleasure of it and not worrying about book report requirements.

Not easy to do because at any given time, like most people, I'm simultaneously reading 4 books - one nonfiction, one for business, one English fiction, one book written by a local writer and now, one classic book, and that's not counting the Spanish and French books I read from time to time - at a very very slow pace!

I know it would be much easier to just download the movie versions of these classic books but I've always believed that our own personal imagination is more powerful than anything that Hollywood can conjure for us.

I've found that reading it aloud is more fun because you can hear the cadence of the dialogue and it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that dialogue written in the 1850s is so different from the cadence of today's contemporary dialogues. It's just world's away in terms of politeness, degree of intrusion and the amount of deference one gives to each other. Plus, you don't read f**k or s**t every other page!

I quickly ran through two chapters of this book while I was just browsing at Powerbooks and decided that this will be my first classic of the year.

I'm just into the first twenty pages but you can immediately see that one of Emily Bronte's talents is quickly setting the mood of the story, not only in the physical setting, but in the mystery that cloaks the main character.