By Karla Accorto
Summer 2017 Intern
If
you ever had to read A Tale of Two Cities
at a young age, you probably felt like I did—a little overwhelmed and not
exactly in love. I never thought I would willingly
pick it up again. As a senior English major, however, I felt I had to give the
popular classic one more shot, and I was pleasantly surprised when I did.
My
second reading has been so enjoyable because I actually understand what is happening.
Dickens is famous for being a verbose writer, and enjoying his work today requires
skills that I lacked at the age of fifteen. Now, however, I have a much larger
vocabulary and can better understand Dickens’s once-baffling diction.
I
also favor the story more now because years of studying literature have given
me the confidence to be critical of a novel’s characters. I now have more faith
in my literary judgments, and I’m not afraid to admit that I dislike a
character from an esteemed “classic.” Knowing that I don’t need to like the characters allows me to form my
own opinions about them—without the fear of being wrong.
As
I begin the final book of the novel, I realize that reading A Tale of Two Cities in high school
might have been “the worst of times,” but reading it again now is absolutely “the
best of times.”
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