So here’s the thing about Sylvia’s Lovers: having vastly enjoyed Wives and Daughters as well as Cranford, my Best Reader and I decided to try an Elizabeth Gaskell novel as our own next Bedtime Book. This was back in the Autumn sometime; I can’t exactly remember. We had got out of the habit of Bedtime Books for ourselves, what with our children now having two different bedtimes as well as a very large amount of required reading aloud to the Youngest Member. But it’s a lovely habit, and makes for better sleep; in Mrs. Gaskell’s day it was evidently quite common for spouses to read to each other of an evening, a custom which should be revived. Unlike, you know, racism, sexism, domestic violence, cheap labor, debtor’s prison, the Empire, open sewers and the Bustle.
But I digress. The point is that my Best Reader and I decided to try one of Ms. Gaskell’s books aloud, and I went to the collected works on the shelf (hurrah for working in an academic library) and judged, as usual, by the cover. Or at least the spine: Sylvia’s Lovers is such a great title.
Alas, when we began, we quickly discovered that this book makes liberal use of eye dialect. It is set in the North, and the rural folk talk like Yorkshire peasants. The first bit of dialogue (which isn’t until page sixteen, as the first chapter is one of those Victorian first chapters) goes like this: Be quiet, wi’ the’, Sylvia? Thou’st splashing me all ower, and my feyther’ll noane be so keen o’ giving me a new cloak as thine is, seemingly. Now, I can do a passable Yorkshire accent, but my Best Reader can’t (perfectly reasonably; she has other skills that are perhaps more useful), so that means that I would be doing all the reading. Which I don’t mind, but it isn’t really fair to her. And then, it takes a fair amount of concentration to read that stuff aloud as well as to make sense of it as a listener. All in all, eye dialect does not make for a good read-aloud book at bedtime. And then, the plot started off very slowly, as is quite common for Victorian novels, but provided for less incentive to pick up the thing of an evening.
So, we started skipping a couple of nights here and there, and then more, and then it was pretty clear that we just weren’t going to read this one, and we should give it up and try something else. I decided to finish it on my own, and made fairly slow going of it. This brings us to last Xmas. We spent a day or two visiting at a house that has very few books in it, so I brought Sylvia’s Lovers with me, and wound up finishing the first half there. And leaving the book behind when we came home.
I do not ordinarily take library books with me when I travel. The risk of leaving the thing somewhere is too great, and in addition to the monetary cost of paying the fine, there’s the embarrassment of having to fess up to it. Sigh. I try to ease the process for our patrons who lose books, although of course we do put some pressure on them to find the damned things. Particularly when it is, as our copy of Sylvia’s Lovers was, a volume out of a set, and very old and not terribly replaceable. Admittedly, nobody wants to read the thing, but still. Ah, well, what the hell. The advantage of it being out from my place of employment is that I get semester-long loans; I renewed the thing to May, and figured I would get the book back at some point.
However, it did mean that I didn’t have the book with me to finish. And that was my employer’s only copy, what with it not being a very popular book these degenerate days, and it wasn’t like the local public library had a few on their shelves. On the other hand, one of the astonishing things about this internetty age is that old book are available on-line in their entirety; I downloaded the second half of the book onto my laptop to take with me on vacation. And then didn’t read it. I would like to get into the habit of reading books off the screen, as I am fairly frequently in front of the screen and out of urgent internet. And then I go to the less urgent internet, which is Dicewars and Crazy Mammoths, and while those are perfectly good wastes of time, so is a Victorian novel. Alas, I just can’t seem to get my head around the idea that I can read novels on-line; I have seventeen or eighteen recent specfic books on my computer right now, and about a million pages of Victorian Novels whenever I want them, and I have read, er, two books off the screen. In 2008. None at all in the last year and a half. And I haven’t even tried it enough to be able to complain that I really dislike it. I just don’t remember to do it.
Well, anyway. I didn’t read the second half of the book off my laptop on the airplane or anywhere else. And a search of the house I had been staying at did not turn up the hard copy. Hmph. Months pass. Hmph. And then, oh, in mid-April it would have been, the book turns up! And is brought back to me! Hurrah! And I dive right back in to it, because, you know, book. In hand. Worth twenty on the hard drive, evidently. And I finish it in time to return it by the end of the semester. So that’s all right.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.