Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” This book was quite scandalous for its times - vulgar, immoral, risqué. “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Needless to say, the combination of Dreiser being way over my head, my limited English skills and only so much patience an 11-year-old would have with a dictionary, I soon enough started getting distracted by the afternoon episodes of Duck Tales, and therefore my memory of this book has long been just a bit fuzzy.Īnd so I read it again with a set of grown-up eyeballs, sans dictionary this time, armed with a few more gray hairs (all twenty of them) and a hint of a wrinkle. Awed by the idea of a big book in a language I just started to somewhat understand, I reached for it, just missing the much more age-appropriate Treasure Island - but then why'd you think I'd ever want to follow rules?

I was 11, my mother just bought me a brand-spanking-new English dictionary, and my school librarians finally let me roam the section of the library where normally kids were not allowed to wreak havoc in on their own. Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie was the first real book I've ever read in English.

Sister carrie 1900