Wuthering Heights: Why I Quit

The dialect. I quit reading because of the dialect. Bah. Humbug!

Wuthering Heights First Paragraph

Oooooohkay, so that post was Monday, and it's now Saturday, and I haven't even gotten the darned book off the shelf! Bah! Phooey on me!

Pause for a moment while I go get it and blog the first sentence.
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Ready? Ok!

1801--I have just returned from a visit to my landlord--the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.

Woo hoo! Good job, "Currer Bell"! Onward:

This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthopist's Heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name.

Doesn't that just make you want to read on? What's the narrator's name? Why does he/she like the barrenness? Why is the desolation of the landscape so great? Is the desolation of the landscape only cosmetic, or does it reflect a deeper truth about the people who live there? (I admit, these questions are influenced by others' reactions to this book, but only slightly!) Why would Mr. Heathcliff's suspicious eyes make the speaker's heart warm toward him? (That was a clumsy sentence. Oh well. You've just got to deal.) Why were Mr. Heathcliff's eyes made suspicious toward the speaker...is he naturally suspicious of others, or is the speaker someone to be wary of?

Ok. I'm hooked. Toodles.

The Hunt for The Second Book

Whew! After several hunts through our bookcases, I've ascertained that these are books we own that are on The List:

1. Augustine's Confessions


2. Beowulf


3. Bronte's Wuthering Heights


4. Cervantes' Don Quixote


5. Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans


6. Dante's Divine Comedy


7. Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities


8. Dickens' David Copperfield


9. Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov


10. Ellison's Invisible Man


11. Golding's The Lord of the Flies


12. Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude


13. Melville's Moby Dick


14. Mitchell's Gone with the Wind


15. Shelley's Frankenstein


16. Stevenson's Kidnapped


17. Stevenson's Treasure Island


18. Thoreau's Walden

Now, for a Random Integer: The winner is...#3, which is Wuthering Heights. Good. I'll actually read that. (I've heard that it's morose and glum to the max. Maybe their melodromatic gloom will cheer me up.)