When I was in my final year of secondary school, I had to read two more books in English for my reading list. I had already read The World According to Garp by John Irving, and in the summer I bought A Secret History by Donna Tartt. I actually brought that book with me when we went on a vacation, and once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it away. I remember holding the book while I was taking a bath, hoping the moisture wouldn’t ruin the pages. I read it, and I read it again.
This book made me excited about reading books in English in general and from that moment on I have been buying mostly British and American literature. It even feels “off” when I read books or articles in Dutch, and it is almost like Dutch has become my second language when it comes to reading and writing.
I’m actually hoping that the same will happen with ‘older’ English literature, because I’m not really digging it at the moment, but I would very much like to. I think the older literature form the building blocks for the literature that follows, and it’s nice to be ‘informed’. For this week I had to read The Wife of Bath’s Prologue from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a couple of lines from Everyman and the poem They Flee From Me by Thomas Wyatt (the Elder). And although I like the concept of The Canterbury Tales, I just can’t ignore the Middle English that I just don’t know that well. Hopefully it will improve soon…
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