Date Started: October 7, 2013
Date Finished: October 28, 2013
Wow, this was GLOOMY. I somehow never got around to this classic while in high school; not sure how that happened but I never read it. So, cue my predilection for reading classics that I've missed and there you have it, sitting on my kindle, judging me. I actually bought Divergent but couldn't bear the thought of Wuthering Heights continuing to sit there unread, so I dove in.
I'm not sure what I thought this was going to be about. I actually think in my head I had it confused with Jayne Eyre which I may have read in high school but can't quite remember. In any case, I thought there was some romantic element to this book. Somehow I thought I remembered Heathcliff being some super-swoon-worthy character. Um, no. This book was basically nothing but depressing. Heathcliff is a monster whose sole goal in life is to inflict as much pain as possible on others (with the one exception maybe, being Catherine, but even then he never seemed to put her ahead of himself). And what makes it even worse, is that the good deed of rescuing him off of the streets was repaid by this behavior to the family who took him in as a child. There really is no explaining it. He is just horrible.
I did like the story-within-a-story mechanism for telling the tale. It left us somewhat more removed from the horrors. And in the end, Catherine (junior) and Hareton end up happy together despite Heathcliff's best efforts to bring both of their families to ruin. Oh, but I hated the dialect speech of Joseph, the servant of Wuthering Heights - very annoying to read and I have to admit to skimming over large portions of that text.
So, what can I say. I didn't love this book. But I suppose that I am glad that I finally read it. It was a pretty big one to have left unread.
And now, onto some lighter fare...
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