I love reading.  Spend a huge number of waking hours engaged in the activity.  But what I don’t like is being told what to read.

Because of this fact, I don’t really like receiving books as presents; I have never wanted to join a book group; tend to steer clear of other people’s ‘recommendations’; and I found being set specific texts to read at school a particular trial.

Some of these set-texts, which would have once formed part of a very worthy educational curriculum, I have never returned to; the bad memory of being required to read them a permanent black mark against them.

I have already written impassionedly about A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines, which falls squarely into this category.  Similarly, I have entirely dismissed Mark Twain due to a forced prescription of Huck Finn.  That Mississippi dialect still makes me shudder.

Another book, which I resisted as a set-text was The Mayor of Casterbridge.  And, despite discovering an enduring love of Thomas Hardy from my twenties onwards, and having read all his other novels since, a too-early introduction to The Mayor of Casterbridge has made me continually shun that novel.  Until now.

I still have my school edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge.  It has an orange spine, and is from a time when Penguin Classics were branded as The Penguin English Library.  Several of the front pages are loose; it is rather sun-faded; and my name and class number are scrawled at the top of the first page.  Considered as a pure object, it has its own iconography.  I could have bought myself a new copy, but part of this process of truth and reconciliation is facing up to these past demons.

Deep breath.  I start reading.  Michael Henchard, his wife Susan, and their infant daughter Elizabeth-Jane are walking, silently, along a country road close to Weydon-Priors.  Do I remember this beginning to the novel?  Not at all.  Or the rest of the story to follow?  Not a jot of it.  Is it provoking bad memories?  Thankfully, no.  I am able to approach the book as though it is entirely new to me.  And I am enjoying it.  Thoroughly enjoying it.

Enjoying it, because it has been my choice to read it.  My choice to return to it; to reassess its position in my own private canon.

God knows, maybe there is a chance for Kes yet?

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow conquers his demons.