Thursday, January 3, 2008

A Conversation


Scene: Back in December I was at work typing away with the Penguin edition of Clarissa by Samuel Richardson sitting beside me. I had just checked it out that day and was bringing it home to start on over the holiday break. In walks our friendly UPS delivery man laden with boxes. He pauses at my desk and we have a short -- and disturbing -- conversation.



UPS Man: "Hi, Amanda! Wow, that is a huge book!"


Amanda: "Yeah. I'm going to try to read it."


UPS Man: "What is it about?"


Amanda: "Well, it is was written in the 1700s and it is about this girl who gets raped and dies."


UPS Man: "Geez, this guy must not be a very good rapist!"


Amanda: "Excuse me?"


UPS Man: "I mean, I would think it wouldn't take much more than a paragraph to rape someone. Seriously, over 1,000 pages for one rape?!"

5 comments:

Miss Lou Monde said...

Hahahahahahaah, love it! It made my day!

April said...

So happy to see the blog's back; I've missed it.

Please let me know what you think of "Clarissa."

Are you on GoodReads.com?

Andi said...

Oh dear lord.

Heather said...

Oh my goodness. Wow.

That is one scary looking book. I can't wait to hear what you think either. I'm so glad you're back!

Imani said...

Huh. Ha! Well.

Those looooooooong 18th C novels. I'll never get to them.