Stuff I've been reading

I'm supposed to be working. But instead, I have just three words to contribute:

Jane Eyre rocks.

I love the girl. I don't know why. I don't know how this novel managed to get under my skin for the last five years or so, but I've been moving around from place to place with a swiped copy I picked up when I was teaching an ACT prep class in grad school. Meleena had mentioned it casually in conversation a few times, and since I couldn't take the idea of her knowing the book and me not, I tried reading it. Over and over again.

For all its mystery and allure, Charlotte Bronte had to have written the most boring opening to a novel in the history of Good English Novels. Exhibit A:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

Here, my brow usually furrowed and my attention started to wander. I would remember that I had a copy of a Richard Stark novel waiting to be read. I would wonder if The Merchant of Venice didn't bear rereading. I would remember Elle McPherson had a role in Zifferli's film version of the novel, and maybe I could get away with just reading that. No no, I would think, shaking it off. This is good literature. This is what your students hear all the time--it won't kill you to put yourself in their shoes. Read, damn you. Read!

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

Bleeeech.

That was as far as I got until 2003. At that point, I made it about a third through. I only finished the damned thing, start to completion, about a week ago. How can you not like it? Insanity, abused children, forbidden romance, exile, sacrifice, redemption? All lost because I couldn't get past that walk. I'm loathe to discuss it at length--is it possible that an itinerant web-surfer will latch onto this post, become immediately inspired and search out a copy for him/herself?

No way. Because I had to go and put that boring first page up. Try this on for size:

"Wicked and cruel boy!" I said. "You are like a murderer -- you are like a slave-driver -- you are like the Roman emperors!"

...[George, her abusive cousin] ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don't very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me "Rat! Rat!" and bellowed out aloud.

Now that'swhat I'm talking about. Kick the fat kid's butt, Jane!

If that doesn't do it, I don't know what will.