I read things. It’s just what I do. I will read anything (English, German for toddlers) you put in front of me: magazines, blogs, cereal boxes, prescription drug inserts. Even the occasional book.
When it comes to actual books, though, I tend to stick to non-fiction and the classics. I think this is because I don’t have much patience for stories whose characters or plot points, especially, test my woefully underdeveloped suspension of disbelief (Really, Gilbert Grape? Tell me more about your developmentally disabled brother, morbidly obese mother, and that one time you intentionally burned the house to the ground). I prefer my literature to be either true or vetted by millions of readers in generations gone by.
And I’m glad that they have approved Charles Dickens for my reading list, because say what you will about his proclivity for implausible coincidence, the man knew how to write a story. With Dickens, you always know what you’re getting: despite early orphaning/unwarranted imprisonment and consequent poverty/mistreatment, faultless moral beacon struggles through adversity to eventual success and witnessing of adversaries’ material downfall due to greed and general moral depravity.
It’s comforting, in a way. Classic good v. evil, with the helpful Victorian clue that beauty = goodness (there are more than a few Dickens characters who would have been well served to sort this one out a bit earlier in the story).
But this thematic knowledge is NO REASON, Richard Maxwell, editor of Penguin Classics edition printed 2003, to spoil the ending of A Tale of Two Cities with an at best wholly unnecessary endnote four-fifths of the way through.*
So frustrating. I can’t unread it now! Yes, I know justice will prevail, as:
Dickens (Coincidence + Justice) ≠ Rocket Science,
but I didn’t know how.
* Book 3, Chapter 9, Note 1—you’ve been warned.
