I’m the first to adhere to sensible advice– I crave it, I seek it out, I require advice. And one of the greatest pieces of advice I’ve ever seen or read anywhere has come from many, many sources, but it always sounds the same. That is that I should write naturally. As in, how I speak (within reason). Which means that every fifth word ends up “fuck”, and I have to edit a lot of it out, but in the end it does make things better that I was honest. Or as honest as I’m equipped to be– which is not very, but there’s a reason I want to tell long lies for a living when I grow up. I think that in many ways, this willingness to write the way we speak is a fairly new development in literature, in the last fifty years or so. (Seeing as before then, anything that honest would’ve been burned. People still said “bad” things, they just didn’t keep them for posterity. Or, if they did… well that’s another post altogether, and an interesting subject, but I’ll stop with the geek-out now.)

I bring this up because I had this impulse last week to walk to the book store and buy A Tale of Two Cities, which I hadn’t read in quite awhile. I graduated from high school ten years ago, and that was the last time I read it. I remembered really loving it then, and that it renewed my good opinion of Dickens, which had been recently crushed by several trips into his thickest and… let’s call them pointlessly complicated and wordy books. To be nice. But Meghan was talking about it in a comment on a former post here, and then NK Kingston and I just had a long discussion where it popped up, and I suddenly thought what the hell. Why not see if it was really that good.

So I literally got up out of my desk and walked there immediately, which takes about an hour one way; thankfully the weather in Virginia is finally awesome again. So I put my little four dollar copy down on the counter and the nice gentleman behind it smiles at me and says, “Good deal on a good book. It’s a little old-fashioned, but it’s a good book.”

I turned that over and over in my head on the walk home. Old-fashioned, but a good book.

I don’t like it. That qualifier bugs me, Old-fashioned, BUT still good, like that first part is diametrically opposed to the second, or that the two shouldn’t really be allowed to co-exist, but we’ll make a deal with the devil since it’s a good book and let it slip through.

I like Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk as much as the next chick, in their place. But come on, cut old Charles Dickens some slack. Sure he doesn’t say “fuck” every five words like some people with pitiful vocabularies. (Not naming names, but she’s writing this right now.) But Jesus H. Christ, that’s one of the best endings in the history of English literature, even when you know it’s coming. And it’s just a good fucking book, isn’t it? I know, I know, he wasn’t just talking about language, but about the heavy-handed description, the flat characterization (particularly in some cases), etc. Poor nice guy at the register, he meant well and was making very pleasant conversation with me. But I was annoyed anyhow.

That said, I’m fairly unwell right now. So maybe I’d be less grouchy about it if that were different, and I could put a coherent sentence together. (Which, as you might’ve noticed, is not coming easily today.) But still.

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