I wanted to take a moment of your time to plug a product worth its weight in gold: the Barnes and Noble Classics editions. Just like Bantam, Penguin, and so many others, Barnes and Noble releases the all the great classics in their own line, called the Barnes and Noble Classics. I have read a great many of the classics from these editions, and they are awesome. They provide the most helpful footnotes I have ever seen. These notes explain colloquialisms, historical elements, and other information that would have been well-known back in the day, but not so well-known in the here and now. It makes reading a dated book much, much easier.
I say this now because when I bought my copy of A Tale of Two Cities, I failed to drive across town to get the B&N edition, and settled for another version. This version was not remotely helpful in explaining some of the more difficult passages, and was only mildly so in the Afterward.
So if you, or someone you love, must undertake to read a literary classic in the near future, go to your local Barnes and Noble, or visit them online, and buy the Barnes and Noble Classics edition. It will make for a much more enriching experience.
Thank you for your time.
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3 comments:
That reminds me of when I was in high school and read Watership Down. I didn't know until I reached the end that there was a glossary of all the Lupine words available. THAT would have been helpful to know earlier on.
There are people who I think actually live in the world JRR Tolken created. They have many books explaining dialect and meaning and what not. If they had a life, they too would benefit from this. Congrats for reading the good stuff like I haven't.
I have a fantasty book list in my head, and there's lots of Dickens on that list. In my real life there's laundry, lunches to pack,dogs to feed and (just as you described) reading only at bedtime when 99.9% of my energy is gone. So let me know how it goes, and maybe one day I'll catch up to you!
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