I read The Turn of the Screw while sitting in my Victorian house on a dark and stormy night. I kid you not. And it was the scariest thing I'd ever read. Still gives me chills. Also, you've convinced me to read Middlemarch.
In The Innocents (1961) directed by Jack Clayton starring Deborah Kerr, photographed by Freddie Francis, is one of the finest adaptations of the written word, The Turn of the Screw, to the visual/aural/performance medium of a movie.
Ditto! (Shudder!!!) Have not been inclined to revisit that feeling again. Re: Middlemarch… read that when my husband (Literature & Philosophy major at University College Dublin) and I were courting with 3,000 miles between us. We would read the books he was assigned and write to each other about it. Also tackled Tess of the D’Ubervilles and, I think Mill on the Floss. That was over 50 years ago but my visceral memories of that time are still with me. 😊
Was the time you read The Turn of the Screw on a dark and stormy night also the best of times and the worst of times? Was it a damp drizzly November in your soul as you were borne back ceaselessly into the past?
Have you read “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”? It’s my favorite of James’ ghost stories, and it’s got everything packed into 20 or so pages: obsession, bitterness, intrusive thoughts, sibling rivalry, jealousy, insecurity and, of course, a ghost.
The great British composer, Benjamin Britten, wrote a fantastic opera version of Turn of the Screw—all the creepiness of the book, enhanced by a truly glorious/strange musical score that some think of as being a turning screw itself! I’ve been in 2 productions myself (as a singer), once as Flora (my last “child role,” at 35!), and then as Miss Jessel, the vanished governess who may be a ghost, and may have had an illegimate pregnancy, which may have been caused by the sinister vanished butler…). I know that anyone who’s seen and heard it has been stunned by it, and anyone who’s been INSIDE it never forgets the experience!
If you’ve read the book, or are about to, due to the excellent description provided here, boost your enjoyment and/or terror with this 2 hour masterpiece:
I read The Turn of the Screw because I was taking a Henry James class as part of my Masters program. I really came to appreciate his work through that class like I might not have if I had been reading him on my own.
Another reason to read "boring" books: the language. Middlemarch, for example, is filled with incredibly beautiful passages. Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) gets my vote as the best writer of English ever, bar none.
I agree. I am reading a lot of 19th century short stories and they have a lovely rhythm to them. Probably due to longer sentences and a wider vocabulary. Although, since many stories were paid by word, such verbose prose can be overwhelming to the modern reader.
Often, after reading the final sentence of a chapter by Eliot, I have to put the book down and think, How could a human being be so smart and insightful to write this powerfully?
Totally agree. And the sly digs are hilarious. I was surprised by how much I loved it. If you accept that that's how things were then, you begin to see the women's strength and the particularity of each marriage.
I been reading a lot of 19th century novels (for fun!) these past few years and recently re-read Middlemarch. Honestly, some of Eliot's sentences defeated me. I'd go over them several times and have to just give up and move on.
I revel in the memorable writings found in my collection of books from 1700-1940s. I learn new words; I’m not embarrassed by offensive slang, and the writing more often is mesmerizing!
For me, the language makes even a slow-moving plot absorbing!
Some people may find books such as these boring if they read them too early in life, before they have the life experience to appreciate them. Middlemarch may be tough going for high school students, but if they try it again ten years later they might find it engrossing.
As a teenager I spent long, lonely summer holidays in an old house in the Scottish Highlands. There was little to do but read 'old fashioned' books, and I loved them. Middlemarch was one of my favourites. I had few modern books to compare them to, and little else to focus on. I think my immersion in that style of writing makes all the difference. Although I also accept that life experience is important, so my understanding of those books may be very different from an adults understanding.
For me, the definition of a classic is that one can read it at different stages of life, and find completely different ideas in it.
I read many books too early (I was a horribly precious bookworm), and was genuinely surprised when I re-read Jane Austen, for example, and laughed and shuddered through what I had thought was boring goings-on of people whose lives had nothing to do with mine .
I agree, although I don’t think there is such a thing as reading a book '“too early”. I rejoiced in the freedom I had as a child to read any book I could get my hands on (and did). Perhaps nowadays, with such a proliferation of books on so many widespread subjects, the child reader needs to have a sympathetic adult to discuss books with.
Any good art form deserves a second (or more) look. You discover new things in books, art, movies that build a more complete picture.
I agree now, and as a teenager the books saved my sanity. But I could not wait to get to the bright lights of London. 40 years later, I have returned to Scotland!
I'm a big fan of rereading, and/or reexperiencing performance in the case of plays. Truly great works hit differently at different points in life. My personal example is how different King Lear felt when I read it at 15 as the daughter of an unpredictable, alcoholic father dying of cancer, then at 35 watching an amazing performance where every character was portrayed as deeply human and nuanced (at the American Shakespeare Center in Stauton, VA), and most recently at 60 as I watch my grown children struggle with important choices as they live their lives.
Some art is influential because it perfectly captures a zeitgeist, but its reach can feel limited by such tight connection. Some works, however, just seem to transcend the cultures that inspired their creation, touching many different lives in many different times and places.
I tried teaching Middlemarch to college students. The only one who "got" it was a nontraditional student who had escaped a bad marriage. I recently taught it to retirees, and boy did THEY get it.
I've read it five times now, each separated by about a decade, and it has reverberated differently each time. For example, Casaubon no longer seems old at all. I agree with the narrator now and feel sorry for him. Sorrier for Dorothea, of course, but still.
I look forward to reading it again in my next decade.
So true! I read Tess as a high schooler in a very small christian K-12 school. Teacher never once uttered the word rape. I didn’t really realize that’s what it was about until years later.
I had a literature professor who told the class, on the first day, "If you ever read a book and enjoyed it, it probably wasn't any good." You should be teaching lit someplace, just to counterbalance idiots like that guy. You'd be so popular, your class would have to be in the biggest lecture hall.
One of my literature professors said, "I am not interested in whether you like these books. It is not the books that are on trial here." Well! That made me sit up and pay attention.
Loved this list! Wuthering Heights is one of my all-time favorites, but definitely not for why most people think. I love psychology and studying the effects of trauma. Plus the DRAMA. OMG. I just want to read it again now!
I'm in the middle of Middlemarch right now and someone asked me yesterday how it was. I replied that it's actually quite sad. No one told me that beforehand. I'm really enjoying it, but I'm grieved for the women of this era and for women today who still are caught in societal pressures and don't get to enjoy supportive, equal relationships.
My candidate for not boring but subversive is Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. Especially the subplot of Mr Quilp and his abuse of his wife and paedophilic predation of Little Nell. It’s fascinating as much in what Dickens can’t say explicitly as what he can.
I don't come across a lot of people (actually I've never experienced anyone) who has read AND enjoyed Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens is my favorite author and Little Nell is one of the most underrated characters in literature. I cried so so much.
I love TOCS because this was very early on, and Dickens was still writing and publishing the story serially. Basically making it up as he went along. Look at where the original weekly or monthly "installments" begin and end, and you can see where CD wrote himself into corners and how he got out.
And a notepad to create a chart of all the characters! (At least, I need one, or needed one on first read!) In his longer novels, Dickens has a habit of introducing secondary or tertiary characters, leaving them out of the action for 15 or more chapters, then bringing them back in, and I'd have to spend ten minutes flipping through early chapters to jog my memory on who they were. 🙃
Someone else who does this - thank you! It is useful in Dickens but I especially do it with Russian novels. What with the patronymic, diminutive and ‘proper’ names, I would be a confused mess without a list. I put the names on a blank postcard, then use it as a bookmark.
I think you're mostly right on "Middlemarch," but I think it's more generally about society's traps. Of course, there's Dorothea, but think about the doctor (sorry, I forget his name) who wants to reform medical practice along better lines. (In those days, doctors had an incentive to prescribe fake medicines that didn't do anything).
Society pulls him into conformity with all the other doctors, because he can't get patients if he doesn't prescribe useless medications for every ailment.
I also don’t think it’s fair to call it unhinged. It’s no more unhinged than, say, Jane Austen. It’s a fantastic book, but if people are coming in looking for the madness you find in Moby Dick or Wuthering Heights, they won’t find it.
I agree. I read Middlemarch for the first time in February and while it does show the constraints of the time period within the context of marriage, widowhood, politics, and medicine, it is not unhinged.
His name is Lydgate. He isn't trapped by society; he is trapped by sexual infatuation to a woman, Rosamund Vincey, in every way inferior to himself. Men can make mistakes just as women can.
Incidentally, I was in Russia ten years ago and talked to a Russian teacher of English literature. I asked her what her favourite novel was and she instantly answered Middlemarch!
I’d argue that we’re both right. He’s trapped because she wants to have lots of money, and so he takes the path to inferiority. But it’s also true that it’s only an issue because he can’t make money doing the right thing.
I can appreciate your project to encourage people to read classic novels, but I don’t appreciate the simplistic and generalized critique of how teachers teach them. I have certainly never “lied” to my students about a book’s subtext or meaning, and I resent that click-bait-ish language. Teachers teach books in different ways, through different critical lenses, to students with different needs, and with different learning goals. There is no single “correct” way to understand or teach a text.
Middlemarch has so many gems of irony in little throw away lines that I have remembered for 45 years like “sane people do as their neighbors do so if there are any lunatics at large we will know and avoid them,”.
The two I have read from that list are The Turn of the Screw and Middlemarch. The latter is possibly my favourite novel but I am not sure how feminist and subversive it is. Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon is to my mind more a consequence of a natural independence of spirit, including a streak of contrarianism, than an oppressive social system. And she is more or less rescued by a man at the end of the book. I would probably say Vanity Fair is my candidate for a purportedly boring book that turns at least a little wild. I am not sure any other Victorian novel ends in quite that way- no spoilers.
Just when you thought Substack couldn’t get any better, along comes a most novel Honor Thesis.
As an 18th Century Classical English Major, I have read most of your named novels.
Your analysis is pretty much spot-on.
One thing that may be missing, which my very distinguished Melville scholar Professor mentioned, but did not elaborate on (my college years were the early 70s): Melville may have been the first of the major writers to bring homosexuality into the novel’s conversation, well before D. H. Lawrence.
I just read the Count of Monte Cristo. An unbelievably long and complicated soap opera romanticizing a revenge fantasy.
I agree with you about the several books on your list that I have read. And speaking of totally deranged, I can't imagine why Macbeth, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are taught in high school. If any books ought to be banned, it should be these three.
I read The Turn of the Screw while sitting in my Victorian house on a dark and stormy night. I kid you not. And it was the scariest thing I'd ever read. Still gives me chills. Also, you've convinced me to read Middlemarch.
Isn’t crazy how printed words on a page can impact us like that?!
From one masterpiece to another.
In The Innocents (1961) directed by Jack Clayton starring Deborah Kerr, photographed by Freddie Francis, is one of the finest adaptations of the written word, The Turn of the Screw, to the visual/aural/performance medium of a movie.
Ditto! (Shudder!!!) Have not been inclined to revisit that feeling again. Re: Middlemarch… read that when my husband (Literature & Philosophy major at University College Dublin) and I were courting with 3,000 miles between us. We would read the books he was assigned and write to each other about it. Also tackled Tess of the D’Ubervilles and, I think Mill on the Floss. That was over 50 years ago but my visceral memories of that time are still with me. 😊
Okay, that is so romantic. No wonder you married him!
And I'm convinced now to read Turn of the Screw. For some reason, I thought it was a morality tale.
Yes, and report back :)
Was the time you read The Turn of the Screw on a dark and stormy night also the best of times and the worst of times? Was it a damp drizzly November in your soul as you were borne back ceaselessly into the past?
You know, I think it was!
Middlemarch makes Beckett look optimistic
Have you read “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”? It’s my favorite of James’ ghost stories, and it’s got everything packed into 20 or so pages: obsession, bitterness, intrusive thoughts, sibling rivalry, jealousy, insecurity and, of course, a ghost.
The great British composer, Benjamin Britten, wrote a fantastic opera version of Turn of the Screw—all the creepiness of the book, enhanced by a truly glorious/strange musical score that some think of as being a turning screw itself! I’ve been in 2 productions myself (as a singer), once as Flora (my last “child role,” at 35!), and then as Miss Jessel, the vanished governess who may be a ghost, and may have had an illegimate pregnancy, which may have been caused by the sinister vanished butler…). I know that anyone who’s seen and heard it has been stunned by it, and anyone who’s been INSIDE it never forgets the experience!
If you’ve read the book, or are about to, due to the excellent description provided here, boost your enjoyment and/or terror with this 2 hour masterpiece:
https://youtu.be/nEDNzmkMmV4?si=LIrWCCvQUsOs6fSw
Thanks! I never knew this existed.
Yes, read Middlemarch! And I'll read Turn of the Screw.
Middlemarch is great. Give it time to work on you. It’s my favorite of her novels.
Spooky. Love Henry James! Lost hearts by MR James scariest I’ve ever read
I read The Turn of the Screw because I was taking a Henry James class as part of my Masters program. I really came to appreciate his work through that class like I might not have if I had been reading him on my own.
It truly creeped me out when I read it.
Another reason to read "boring" books: the language. Middlemarch, for example, is filled with incredibly beautiful passages. Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) gets my vote as the best writer of English ever, bar none.
I agree. I am reading a lot of 19th century short stories and they have a lovely rhythm to them. Probably due to longer sentences and a wider vocabulary. Although, since many stories were paid by word, such verbose prose can be overwhelming to the modern reader.
But nothing verbose about the novels of Eliot, Dickens, and Trollope, the 19th century British masters I've read the most.
Once you get over the page count, they are not verbose at all. I love every word of Eliot and Dickens, and especially Trollope.
Often, after reading the final sentence of a chapter by Eliot, I have to put the book down and think, How could a human being be so smart and insightful to write this powerfully?
I agree, it is mostly a problem with 19th century short (or not so short) story writers. Trollope has a wonderful turn of phrase.
Totally agree. And the sly digs are hilarious. I was surprised by how much I loved it. If you accept that that's how things were then, you begin to see the women's strength and the particularity of each marriage.
I stan George Eliot ❤️.
Yes, George Eliot is one of my favorite writers too! :D
George Eliot is the shizznit.
Jane Austen is the Mozart of English prose. Perhaps Eliot is more like Beethoven?
Great post. Any idea why this book is called Middlemarch?
Does the title suggest that women should march down an average path?
Why one word?
From my understanding “march” means a borderland, so the title refers to a town caught between old and new ways of life.
And it’s one word simply to make it feel like a real place name, not a phrase. Pretty clever, really.
Bar NONE.
I been reading a lot of 19th century novels (for fun!) these past few years and recently re-read Middlemarch. Honestly, some of Eliot's sentences defeated me. I'd go over them several times and have to just give up and move on.
I revel in the memorable writings found in my collection of books from 1700-1940s. I learn new words; I’m not embarrassed by offensive slang, and the writing more often is mesmerizing!
For me, the language makes even a slow-moving plot absorbing!
The only reason to read most books is if they are well written. Using beautiful language.
Yeah, but i’m reading a Michael Crichton book and it ain't for the prose.
I like murder mysteries. And some great literature. Ian Rankin. A good, but not a great writer. I know there is room for both.
John LeCarre. Tinker Tailor is a classic.
I loved all that era of LeCarre. Agreed. Classic spy novels. Which is a fun genre.
Yes, the mastery of the language is remarkable. A few years ago I read Fielding’s “Tom Jones” and must admit it was challenging.
Some people may find books such as these boring if they read them too early in life, before they have the life experience to appreciate them. Middlemarch may be tough going for high school students, but if they try it again ten years later they might find it engrossing.
I agree!
As a teenager I spent long, lonely summer holidays in an old house in the Scottish Highlands. There was little to do but read 'old fashioned' books, and I loved them. Middlemarch was one of my favourites. I had few modern books to compare them to, and little else to focus on. I think my immersion in that style of writing makes all the difference. Although I also accept that life experience is important, so my understanding of those books may be very different from an adults understanding.
For me, the definition of a classic is that one can read it at different stages of life, and find completely different ideas in it.
I read many books too early (I was a horribly precious bookworm), and was genuinely surprised when I re-read Jane Austen, for example, and laughed and shuddered through what I had thought was boring goings-on of people whose lives had nothing to do with mine .
*precocious*. Sigh. Autocarrot in Spanish. 🙄🤣
I agree, although I don’t think there is such a thing as reading a book '“too early”. I rejoiced in the freedom I had as a child to read any book I could get my hands on (and did). Perhaps nowadays, with such a proliferation of books on so many widespread subjects, the child reader needs to have a sympathetic adult to discuss books with.
Any good art form deserves a second (or more) look. You discover new things in books, art, movies that build a more complete picture.
Your teenage holidays are what I imagine heaven will be like.
I agree now, and as a teenager the books saved my sanity. But I could not wait to get to the bright lights of London. 40 years later, I have returned to Scotland!
Right? I would be blissfully happy if all I had to do for the rest of my life was to read. 📚📚📚
That is a very good point, Greg! I never thought of it that way.
I’ve read Middlemarch four times. Better every time.
I'm a big fan of rereading, and/or reexperiencing performance in the case of plays. Truly great works hit differently at different points in life. My personal example is how different King Lear felt when I read it at 15 as the daughter of an unpredictable, alcoholic father dying of cancer, then at 35 watching an amazing performance where every character was portrayed as deeply human and nuanced (at the American Shakespeare Center in Stauton, VA), and most recently at 60 as I watch my grown children struggle with important choices as they live their lives.
Some art is influential because it perfectly captures a zeitgeist, but its reach can feel limited by such tight connection. Some works, however, just seem to transcend the cultures that inspired their creation, touching many different lives in many different times and places.
I tried teaching Middlemarch to college students. The only one who "got" it was a nontraditional student who had escaped a bad marriage. I recently taught it to retirees, and boy did THEY get it.
I've read it five times now, each separated by about a decade, and it has reverberated differently each time. For example, Casaubon no longer seems old at all. I agree with the narrator now and feel sorry for him. Sorrier for Dorothea, of course, but still.
I look forward to reading it again in my next decade.
Don’t forget Silas Marner. Hardly any h.s. sophomore gets that one.
So true! I read Tess as a high schooler in a very small christian K-12 school. Teacher never once uttered the word rape. I didn’t really realize that’s what it was about until years later.
I hated moby dick and I still hate it. The same lesson can be learned without all the hunting and sailing gobbledygook.
Happened to me, more than once.
I had a literature professor who told the class, on the first day, "If you ever read a book and enjoyed it, it probably wasn't any good." You should be teaching lit someplace, just to counterbalance idiots like that guy. You'd be so popular, your class would have to be in the biggest lecture hall.
That’s the nicest compliment ever, thank you!
One of my literature professors said, "I am not interested in whether you like these books. It is not the books that are on trial here." Well! That made me sit up and pay attention.
Great quote!
Part 2 please!
Loved this list! Wuthering Heights is one of my all-time favorites, but definitely not for why most people think. I love psychology and studying the effects of trauma. Plus the DRAMA. OMG. I just want to read it again now!
I'm in the middle of Middlemarch right now and someone asked me yesterday how it was. I replied that it's actually quite sad. No one told me that beforehand. I'm really enjoying it, but I'm grieved for the women of this era and for women today who still are caught in societal pressures and don't get to enjoy supportive, equal relationships.
just ask chatgpt, this author uses AI to write all of these.
Chatgpt could never, have you tried using it lately for long-form content? Garbage. But I will take your comment as a compliment.
I promise you it's not hard to tell. You don't even hide it lol.
More AI slop.
Hi David, thank you for taking the time to comment.
True
I was thinking the same thing… sad!
That section on "Moby-Dick" should be printed on the back cover of every edition.
Loved this post and Part 2 please!
My candidate for not boring but subversive is Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. Especially the subplot of Mr Quilp and his abuse of his wife and paedophilic predation of Little Nell. It’s fascinating as much in what Dickens can’t say explicitly as what he can.
I don't come across a lot of people (actually I've never experienced anyone) who has read AND enjoyed Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens is my favorite author and Little Nell is one of the most underrated characters in literature. I cried so so much.
I love TOCS because this was very early on, and Dickens was still writing and publishing the story serially. Basically making it up as he went along. Look at where the original weekly or monthly "installments" begin and end, and you can see where CD wrote himself into corners and how he got out.
Absolutely! It’s really difficult to get how Dickens writes without understanding the publishing industry at the time.
The "Tales of the City" series (hey, same acronym! Or almost.) started out the same way, as a weekly column.
I love Dickens, but you need time and a quiet room (preferably by the fire in winter) to immerse yourself in his world.
And a notepad to create a chart of all the characters! (At least, I need one, or needed one on first read!) In his longer novels, Dickens has a habit of introducing secondary or tertiary characters, leaving them out of the action for 15 or more chapters, then bringing them back in, and I'd have to spend ten minutes flipping through early chapters to jog my memory on who they were. 🙃
Someone else who does this - thank you! It is useful in Dickens but I especially do it with Russian novels. What with the patronymic, diminutive and ‘proper’ names, I would be a confused mess without a list. I put the names on a blank postcard, then use it as a bookmark.
Yes! A must for every Dostoevsky novel I ever tackled.
I think you're mostly right on "Middlemarch," but I think it's more generally about society's traps. Of course, there's Dorothea, but think about the doctor (sorry, I forget his name) who wants to reform medical practice along better lines. (In those days, doctors had an incentive to prescribe fake medicines that didn't do anything).
Society pulls him into conformity with all the other doctors, because he can't get patients if he doesn't prescribe useless medications for every ailment.
The original good ol’ boys club?
Yeah, pretty much.
I also don’t think it’s fair to call it unhinged. It’s no more unhinged than, say, Jane Austen. It’s a fantastic book, but if people are coming in looking for the madness you find in Moby Dick or Wuthering Heights, they won’t find it.
I agree. I read Middlemarch for the first time in February and while it does show the constraints of the time period within the context of marriage, widowhood, politics, and medicine, it is not unhinged.
His name is Lydgate. He isn't trapped by society; he is trapped by sexual infatuation to a woman, Rosamund Vincey, in every way inferior to himself. Men can make mistakes just as women can.
Incidentally, I was in Russia ten years ago and talked to a Russian teacher of English literature. I asked her what her favourite novel was and she instantly answered Middlemarch!
I’d argue that we’re both right. He’s trapped because she wants to have lots of money, and so he takes the path to inferiority. But it’s also true that it’s only an issue because he can’t make money doing the right thing.
But you make a great point.
I loved The Awakening. I didn’t think it was boring at all. It made me a fan of Chopin.
Also, Part 2, please.
I can appreciate your project to encourage people to read classic novels, but I don’t appreciate the simplistic and generalized critique of how teachers teach them. I have certainly never “lied” to my students about a book’s subtext or meaning, and I resent that click-bait-ish language. Teachers teach books in different ways, through different critical lenses, to students with different needs, and with different learning goals. There is no single “correct” way to understand or teach a text.
Noted.
Middlemarch has so many gems of irony in little throw away lines that I have remembered for 45 years like “sane people do as their neighbors do so if there are any lunatics at large we will know and avoid them,”.
I enjoy reading your Substack but wish, as others have said, that you wouldn’t divulge the endings.
I’ll keep that in mind moving forward, promise!
Perhaps have a part two, with a spoiler alert. The ending is often necessary for a full analysis.
The two I have read from that list are The Turn of the Screw and Middlemarch. The latter is possibly my favourite novel but I am not sure how feminist and subversive it is. Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon is to my mind more a consequence of a natural independence of spirit, including a streak of contrarianism, than an oppressive social system. And she is more or less rescued by a man at the end of the book. I would probably say Vanity Fair is my candidate for a purportedly boring book that turns at least a little wild. I am not sure any other Victorian novel ends in quite that way- no spoilers.
I love Vanity Fair for Becky Sharp. Such a shrewd portrait of a woman who grew up on mean streets and understood the world owed her nothing.
Vanity Fair boring? Surely you jest?
Yes that’s the point- it’s not boring!
Dear Ms. Rodriguez:
Well played old girl, well played indeed.
Just when you thought Substack couldn’t get any better, along comes a most novel Honor Thesis.
As an 18th Century Classical English Major, I have read most of your named novels.
Your analysis is pretty much spot-on.
One thing that may be missing, which my very distinguished Melville scholar Professor mentioned, but did not elaborate on (my college years were the early 70s): Melville may have been the first of the major writers to bring homosexuality into the novel’s conversation, well before D. H. Lawrence.
That is fascinating! I want to hear more, thank you for such a kind comment!
I just read the Count of Monte Cristo. An unbelievably long and complicated soap opera romanticizing a revenge fantasy.
I agree with you about the several books on your list that I have read. And speaking of totally deranged, I can't imagine why Macbeth, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are taught in high school. If any books ought to be banned, it should be these three.