Karen's Reviews > Twice-Told Tales

I love this book! Everything about it is perfect. The preface, the introduction, the author bio, and every single story. I only wish there were another 100 stories - I didn't want it to end. It most certainly isn't an easy read. I don't think it is any secret that Hawthorne is dense and tough to read. He can say in a beautiful fifty word sentence what a contemporary author would say in ten. And he says it all backwards and upside down. Half of reading Hawthorne is solving the puzzles that each of his sentences resemble. But I'm a classics geek and I couldn't get enough of it. I think it helped that they were short stories which makes it easier to put the book down after a couple of exhausting stories, knowing that when you pick it up again you will be starting fresh with a whole new story. I'm not sure whether I'm up to The Scarlet Letter, which I vaguely remember hating in high school, or The House of Seven Gables quite yet, but if another hundred short stories were suddenly unearthed somewhere, sign me on. This book is a beautiful introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne.