Dickens

I have recently been reading Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. When I was in high school, we read a bit of Dickens and I hated it. I had an English teacher who was so boring and so obsessed with picking everything we had to read to pieces, that she almost killed my love of reading, and did ruin Dickens for me, for a long time.

Years later, for reasons that I don't recall, I decided to read Bleak House, and quickly discovered the way Dickens should be read. Most of his novels were first published in monthly installments in a magazine he published. People waited eagerly each month to get the next installment and find out what was happening to their favorite characters. When I learned that, I realized that Dickens was writing a print version of soap operas.

Once I realized that his novels were nothing but an early version of the soaps, I became fascinated with them. This is no knock on Dickens. The plots are great, the characters interesting and the writing was superb. He also had quite a few important observations about life in his times.

More and more, as I grow older and, hopefully, a little wiser, I realize how much teachers kill literature for their students with over analysis. In college, I had one professor who taught literature who could make that sort of analysis interesting, but most, especially in high school, do not have that talent and listening to them drone on and on is a sure way to turn kids off to reading for a long time. That is a shame because there are great stories that they are missing.

If your high school teacher made literature as boring as a watching your lawn grow, go back and try some of the old books. You will have to adjust a bit because the style of writing is different from modern writing, but, be patient, and when you catch the rhythm, you might find that you love the stories.