Required Reading Fail: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Allow me to list a few subjects that are likely to turn me off a book:
1. Puritans.
2. Infidelity.
3. Religious themes, particularly the Puritan kind (Oh boy! Let's discuss sin!)
But hey, we're all bound to read something in school we don't like, and we'll have to grin it and bear it. Then there was one of my later years in high school, where I had to read The Scarlet Letter. Oddly enough, the above three reasons would only be small slices of a pie chart I would make regarding my hatred for this book. The biggest piece of all? How insufferably tedious the prose is.
The introduction, "The Custom House," served as a warning about what was to come. It went on and on and on. And if memory serves me correct, it hardly had anything to do with the book itself until the last few pages. Finally we get to the first chapter, where I bold the one sentence (or rather, the idea...) that I liked in the entire book:
The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
If you haven't miraculously slogged through those two paragraphs, I'll sum it up for you; the story we're about to share is tragic, so here's a rose to remind you of the nicer things in life or ease the gloom. I thought that was a nice touch. Too bad it's tangled up and buried under verbose tl;dr garbage.
In short, reading this book was a chore. I didn't give a fuck about the characters, and the plot even less. Whether or not Hawthorne intended symbolism, I don't care about that either. If you ever wanted to turn someone off from developing a love of reading, hand them The Scarlet Letter. The only use I have for this book is teasing my Dad with it and sharing his pain about having to read it. At least I didn't have to read The House of Seven Gables. He said that one was even worse. I dread to think about it and feel grateful for having avoided it.