Review of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte…sort of.
My Reading Group always programs a classic novel in the year's selection of books. Often it is an Austen ☺
This year it was Jane Eyre. I was looking forward to reading this book, having studied it at school.
Now, for blogging purposes, I read a book a week. That is not the only reading I do. I sometimes have to read additional books to review for Open House on 103.2. Then there is my research project for my Masters… and the reading I do for my job as a Policy & Communications Adviser, and the books I try and read to keep up with my teenage daughter and son, and reading for Bible Study…
Basically, my life revolves around words. I have become a very fast reader. I can polish off a contemporary novel in under three hours. I scan for concepts and meaning for study and work.
So, I set aside three hours for Jane Eyre. Oops! Big underestimation. I've been reading for five hours and still going!
Why is reading this book taking longer?
Firstly, it's the language. Words like timorous, cavillers, turbid, captious, artifice… and that's just the first couple of chapters! I need to read this book with a dictionary in the other hand. (For those who would like to know: timorous means fearful and timid by nature; cavillers are those who raise annoying petty objections, turbid is cloudiness or murkiness, captious is tending to find fault, and artifice means a crafty deception).
Secondly, it's the complex sentence structure. Sentences in modern books tend to be shorter, with one thought, much like newspaper reports. They are not too demanding on us. There are exceptions, of course, but this seems to be a trend.
Thirdly, it's the subtlety of the characters and plots. This book needs attention. It needs blocks of extended time for reading to reward the reader.
This illustrates some points that John Freeman makes in a great new book: Shrinking the World (more on this book next week!). He says: "The nature of screens - and how we work on, over and through them onto the Internet - has effected a huge epistemological shift that goes beyond merely writing our way into existence. It's changing how we read and what we read."
He quotes Dana Gioia, a former chair of the US National Endowment for the Arts: "What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading."
Instead we lazily and selfishly scan and skim through emails and texts. We tend to leapfrog over long blocks of text. We need more space, more bullet points, short sentences, bold, CAPITALS and italics to help us grab the minimum of what we need to move on.
No-one knows what the impact of this will be, although reading comprehension statistics for young people are falling dramatically.
Instead, we need to challenge ourselves with books like Jane Eyre. We need to slow down, give it the attention it deserves, savour it…
Unfortunately, I missed the deadline for my reading group, so I decided to watch the DVD instead!
KARA MARTIN is a lecturer with School of Christian Studies (www.socs.org.au), and is an avid reader and book group attendee. Kara does book reviews for Hope 1032's Open House (www.theopenhouse.net.au).
