The Unfortunate Traveller & Other Works - Thomas Nashe

Apparently part of being an English major means I have shelves full of books I was supposed to read for class and ... didn't. I have 17(?) books to go to meet my goal and in an effort to not purchase a million and four books in the next couple of months I raided my bookshelf, my brother's bookshelf (he reads now, who knew?) and my aunt's bookshelf. And then I still managed to spend $90 at Chapters. Nobody's perfect.

So this Thomas Nashe guy, he was a contemporary of Shakespeare's, and in one of my Shakespeare classes - in what I am guessing was an attempt to broaden our understanding of the period - we were assigned The Unfortunate Traveller as a little light reading. And I actually did read it. But I hadn't read any of the other pieces in this anthology and since I am trying to broaden my literary horizons and this was gathering dust on my shelf anyways I thought I would give it a try.

The good thing is it made me realize that broadening my horizons doesn't mean I have to read things I don't like; I just have to try new things and be open to liking things I didn't expect to like. In this case, I didn't actually finish the book, or the first story really. And it gave me incentive to clean out our bookshelves and take things to a 2nd hand bookstore. I am sure Thomas Nashe is someone's cup of tea. Just not mine. Which I kind of feel bad about, but I guess that liking Shakespeare isn't necessarily a pre-requisite for liking authors who wrote in the same time period. And maybe it's not fair to say that I don't like Nashe ... I did like the flow of the writing. I liked how the words felt like they should be read aloud, how the sentences had cadence, how it felt like poetry. But it didn't make sense to me. I would read and read and read and feel all nice but I would get to the end of a sentence or paragraph and have no idea what I had just read or what it meant in correlation to the previous sentence or paragraph, never mind in the grand scheme of things. It's not a language barrier because I can follow along with Shakespeare, and I understood on a basic level what the words meant ... I think that perhaps Nashe was a more political writer than story teller, and maybe the first story in the book was not a good place to start because it was all social commentary and I have no real basis for understanding 16th century social commentary. Maybe I will come back one day and it will all make sense and I will wonder how I ever felt the way I do now (kind of like with the Simpson's, how when I was younger and had no real point of reference for their jokes and cultural innuendoes I didn't find them funny but now that I have more of a framework I find them hilarious). But right now is what matters and I don't appreciate Nashe right now and I have better things to do than to spend an hour reading 15 pages that my brain only processes as blah blah blah.