Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)

Once again, in the glow of completing another "classic", I must reflect back on my high school English curriculum. I went to a super-high-achieving public school, but I think all of the emphasis was on math and science. At least that would explain the disparity in my SAT scores. I don't remember a whole lot about my English classes. The last year I can recall doing grammar and vocabulary work was ninth grade, and the literature assigned was all over the map. I believe it was at the tender age of fourteen that Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles was dropped in my lap with little context, so it is no wonder I hated it and ignored it (except for the movie) for the next 26 years.

What I really needed to appreciate it, assuming there was any hope for me at that age, was an historical and a literary context. We didn't learn a thing about the Victorian era in Britain or anything about the role of Wessex in the course of British history. Maybe they were expecting another class to field that one. Secondly, there should have been a more cohesive order to the selection of books to be read. For me, it wasn't until much later that I thought of putting authors like Austen, Dickens, and Hardy on a chronology. What trends were they establishing or working against? How did they approach the writing process?

With Tess 2.0, I had a better sense of these things, plus no problem reading the endnotes and supplements when I needed a little extra understanding. For this, I came out of the experience much better. Even though it was well over a hundred years ago, and in a foreign country, many of the themes of life's experiences shone through. Hardy was a bit of a rebel for being so frank about talking about the kind of things everyone knew was happening, but just didn't write about. Of course without this context, Hardy seems pretty darn prudish. So it's no wonder while so many students choose to revile the book. But all these years later, now I'm wondering if they have tours of the area. I guess that makes me a boring adult now.

On a housekeeping note, I'm tallying up my stats and it has been an embarrassingly bad reading year for me. I'm going to be mature and blame the marathon training, plus much of my reading energy being devoted to studying philosophy. There's a lot of good books on the horizon, so I'm looking forward to stepping up my game in 2017.