Update on reading Lorna Doone

Wait, what does "Her baint coom, Maister Zider-press" mean?

I think I must have been expecting something other than what it's giving me. For one thing, all of that old English is KILLING ME. Bleh! Okay, yes, I love Shakespeare. But that's mostly because Shakespeare had a lyrical quality to his writing that simply sucks me into the story. Everything makes sense, everything has a purpose and a point to it.

What is the point of John Ridd riding his cousin Tom's horse and nearly getting killed while doing it? I'm afraid that R.D. Blackmore found far too many side plots than he needed and managed to incorporate every single one of them into this story.

Combine that with the extremely old English and I'm floundering a bit.

When John was fishing in the icy stream and found his way into the Doone valley, I was interested. Those scenes had everything to do with the plot and because I already know some of the story from the film version, I was fascinated at how they were similar and how they differed.

Overall, though, this is one looooooooooong book and I would give anything for those characters with the dialogue I can't understand to just go crawl away into some other story!

As an update, I'm about 110 pages into Lorna Doone and I will persevere, but who knows how long it will take me to finish!

Has anyone ever read Lorna Doone before? What was your impression of it? How long did it take you to read it?

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