Reading the Classics

It seems that as soon as one turns 14, exits middle school and enters high school there is never enough time. With the stress of APUSH, Chemistry, and Calculus constantly looming, your life becomes filled with assigned readings and problem sets so that in your few moments of peace you neither have the ability or desire to do anything but take a moment to finally breathe.

Therein lies the beauty of summer vacation. In summer you have time to earn minimum wage at the local pizza shop, see your friends and watch enough TV to turn your brain to mush. During the school year there is never enough time, but during summer you have all the time in the world.

Before high school, I devoured books, but once freshmen year started I stopped reading entirely unless it was for class. Even worse, some of the assigned reading was expedited by the use of Sparknotes and Wikipedia. So the summer after freshmen year I started a tradition, one which I have honored every summer until now (my senior year of college). Every May I choose two books, two classics, and read them over the summer. While it may not seem like the largest commitment I could make, I always seem to choose the thickest books available and having never liked an English class which I have taken, it is a rather impressive feat for me.

From Don Quixote to Crime and Punishment I have loved my tradition but this past summer (2014) I couldn’t bear to finish my second book, The Portrait of a Lady. The summer of 2013 I had a girly summer where I picked two classic romance novels – Madame Bovary and Gone with the Wind (insert groan here). Madame Bovary was first and I absolutely hated it. Not for the writing, but because of the main character, Emma Bovary, who consistently whined about her boring life and did nothing to “fix it” but have an affair and ruin her husband’s life. So when Scarlet O’Hara appeared on the pages of Gone with the Wind I was hooked. Here was a girl who went after what she wanted and did not allow social niceties to stop her. SPOILER ALERT So when things did not work out as planned in the final pages of the book, I was angry. Finally I had found a character I related to, liked and respected and after a 1,200 page investment in her she ends up miserable? I was not happy. This caused Isabel Archer’s appearance in The Portrait of a Lady not to be exciting, rather scary. Scary because I worried that her free thinking would lead to her demise and that I would end my summer disappointed once more in a tradition which I had grown to love. Because of that, the book remains lying on my desk with the bookmark dangerously close to the end. Maybe some night I will find the courage to finish it. Or maybe May will come and I will find a book that does not have a strong willed, relatable, female protagonist.