Sons and Lovers
Sons and Lovers, a story of working-class England, is D. H. Lawrence’s third novel. It went through various drafts, and was titled “Paul Morel” until the final draft, before being published and met with an indifferent reaction from contemporary critics. Modern critics now consider it to be D. H. Lawrence’s masterpiece, with the Modern Library placing it ninth in its “100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century.” The novel follows the Morels, a family living in a coal town, and headed by a passionate but boorish miner. His wife, originally from a refined family, is dragged down by Morel’s classlessness, and finds her life’s joy in her children. As the children grow up and start leading lives of their own, they struggle against their mother’s emotional drain on them. Sons and Lovers was written during a period in Lawrence’s life when his own mother was gravely ill. Its exploration of the Oedipal instinct, frank depiction of working-class household unhappiness and violence, and accurate and colorful depiction of Nottinghamshire dialect, make it a fascinating window into the life of people not often chronicled in fiction of the day.
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What Hacker News says
- "Publish an abridged version. Make it clear that it is abridged, and sell it as a separate product."
I recall when I was at school decades ago at a time when the use of certain words in public was much less acceptable than now that our Shakespeare texts had certain words expunged from them as they had been deemed unacceptable for our 'delicate' ears.
We highschool students were completely oblivious of the fact until to save costs I found a copy of my father's Shakespeare text which he had kept from his schooldays and used it as my textbook. When following its text in class I found my copy contained a paragraph that had been omitted from the authorized school edition.
Suffice to say, my edition became a sensation amongst the kids, everyone wanted to read the 'naughty' bit. It's so long ago that I can't remember chapter and verse but the word we delicate little flowers weren't supposed to see was bastard. Big deal!
What was immediately obvious to me even at that young age was that bannings, prohibition and censorship is counterproductive and it's much more likely to have the opposite effect of what's intended.
Around that time there was much controversy over the publication of D. H. Lawrence's† Lady Chatterley's Lover which was deemed by the Wowser Brigade as obscene. This only had the effect of multiple 'clandestine' copies turning up in the school playground with us boys huddled in small groups reading the 'naughty' parts.
Several years later a similar controversy erupted over Philip Roth' Portnoy's Complaint, and even later I came across that strange and most peculiar of works W.S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch at a secondhand book sale which shocked even my somewhat blunt sensibilities (its controversy was somewhat before my time but its notoriety still lingers even now).
It is almost certain that I would never have come across any of these works let alone bothered to have read them UNLESS public attention had made them notorious—the fact is I just don't read this sort of stuff unless controversy has first thrust it into the public limelight. There's a lesson here to be learned with respect to this Dahl affair.
Methinks there may be somewhat more to this controversy than just protecting young minds. There's nothing like a controversal beat-up to improve sales.
I'm almost certain that our censored Shakespeare texts had no impact on our morals whatsoever, if anything it made us kids more worldly and less naïve after we'd found out that we'd been censored.
We adults underestimate both the intelligence and resilience of kids, they know and don't forget when we've been hoodwinking them. No doubt, kids definitely need protection but overprotection can ill-equip them for the realities of a harsh world.
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† Incidentally, in hindsight, it's interesting to note the double standard that applied when I was at school. On the one hand, our Shakespeare was censored over a nonsensically trivial matter, at the same time we had to study and be examined upon controversial novelist D.H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers.
Whilst Sons and Lovers was a slightly saucy novel for that time it was somewhat of a joke that we kids had to study it around the time that the publication of Lawrence's more notorious novel was the subject of court action—that is, it was in the news for all the 'wrong' reasons. The dichotomy was damned obvious, even to us kids.
- You raise some good points.
Over the past year, I have dedicated hundreds of hours towards improving my reading speed. I usually use Acceleread on my iPad; most recently I used it to read D.H Lawrence's Sons & Lovers at around 750-800 wpm. I also use Beeline -a different type of reading tool with some additional functionality for dyslexics- when reading web pages.
I've learned that certain types of prose make for poor speed reading material. Without a "rewind" option, there is no way that I can use these apps to read anything instructional or anything involving a high level of detail (such as a mystery novel). I understand that allowing the user to rewind would sacrifice speed, but speed can't always take precedence over clarity.
Also - in terms of the text- there needs to be a better method for handling quoted text. With speed reading apps that give the user the option of seeing chunks of words, it is far too easy to lose track of who is speaking when one chunk of words has an opening quotation mark and the next chunk of words [may or may not] have a closing quotation mark. I'm guessing that this problem is exacerbated by the fact that - in Spritz's case- words are only presented one at a time.
Here are some things I would I would like to see adopted by speed-readers:
Rewind functionality
Punctuation-based text color:
If the text is in between quotation marks, parenthesis or brackets, this text should be shaded a slightly different color than the rest.Contextual deceleration:
I would love it if a speed reading app would automatically slow down at the end of a chapter. The last few sentences of a chapter are usually crafted with especially deliberate care and are meant to be savored.More customization options for dyslexics:
For example, Beeline allows users to chose a specific type of font that is specifically geared towards dyslexics. In the future, I'd like to see speed readers enable these types of fonts (as well as customization options for line height and letter spacing).
