{"id":1,"date":"2013-04-24T17:08:03","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T17:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/?p=1"},"modified":"2014-03-03T10:27:02","modified_gmt":"2014-03-03T18:27:02","slug":"ethan_frome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/ethan_frome\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethan Frome<\/em>
Or, The Man Who Tried to Blame It on the Cat"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Why Do I Have to Read This?<\/span><\/strong> \"Edith<\/a><\/h2>\n

The short answer is, you don\u2019t. The apocalypse will come, and there will be no one handing out brownie points to the ones who actually read, mmm, let\u2019s say, Ethan Frome<\/em><\/a>, instead of Spark Noting<\/a> it. If the short answer is all you crave in this short life, then, blithe spirit, you really do need to read Ethan Frome<\/em>\u2014so that you may internalize the moral of the story, which is:\u00a0Life is short, unless you do something mindbogglingly stupid\u2014for example, go for a short, fast answer on a doomed sled\u2014in which case, it can end up being very, very long. Here are a few more reasons\u00a0why: 1) So that you will not forever be in the dark when certain pop culture references come up at parties, such as \u201cWatch out for that tree!\u201d and \u201cDoh!\u201d Both of which\u00a0should have originated in Ethan Frome<\/em>, but didn\u2019t. 2) So that you will not go forth as a patriotic American believing the myth that life was more wholesome and rewarding in a technology free agrarian society. 3) Note to students: This point is very important. So that not everything on your reading list is more than three hundred pages.\u00a0Ethan Frome<\/em> is a short work that packs in a lot of easy-to-spot symbolism, foreshadowing, setting-as-character, antiheroism, and irony\u2014an understanding of which comes in handy when reading longer works such as Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles<\/em> and Vanity Fair<\/em>.\u00a0Short works, such as Ethan Frome<\/em>, are assigned in the hope of sparking an interest in an author\u2019s bigger, more imposing, but frequently more fun to read novels, such as the mirthless House of Mirth<\/em> in which another brassy heroine crashes and burns, only worse. Much worse. And there is this, too: 4) Hundreds of thousands of people have read Ethan Frome<\/em> and liked it. Many hated it in high school, then, reading it again in their old age ten years later, found the depth and beauty their teachers had vainly hoped would be observable the first time around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Do I Have to Read This? The short answer is, you don\u2019t. The apocalypse will come, and there will be no one handing out brownie points to the ones who actually read, mmm, let\u2019s say, Ethan Frome, instead of Spark Noting it. If the short answer is all you crave in this short life, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6,10,9,7,8],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-why-do-i-have-to-read-this","tag-book-review","tag-edith-wharton","tag-ethan-frome","tag-literature","tag-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/9"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longharecontent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}