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These days, I’m reading The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, which is a collection of short stories and poetry. Poe was a very influential American writer who contributed greatly to the Gothic horror, detective, and even science fiction genres, and whose work influenced other great writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and H. P. Lovecraft.
Poe lived from 1809 to 1849, dying under mysterious circumstances at the young age of just 40. His life was a series of tragedies that are reflected in the dark and macabre themes of his writing.
What I find interesting about his stories is that, while the stories are works of fiction, he includes many interesting and well-researched (for his time) scientific (or pseudoscientific) topics. For example, in one story called The Gold-Bug, he explains the basics of codebreaking, and in another called A Descent into the Maelstrom, he describes the Moskstraumen, which is one of the strongest systems of tidal eddies and whirlpools in the world (located in Norway). So, while I’m enjoying the adventures of his fictional characters, I also feel like I’m learning something.
(Also, for anyone who has read and enjoyed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Poe’s tales of C. Auguste Dupin’s investigations might be quite interesting!)
What’s challenging, however, is understanding the vocabulary and references in his work, and to be honest, I cannot recommend his stories to someone who is learning English as a second language. Poe’s sentences are long and complex and contain many words that are very rare or completely obsolete these days. He also frequently uses French and Latin words and phrases, which may have been well-known to intellectual readers in his days but are now quite unfamiliar to most people.
Overall, while some elements in Poe’s stories can become a little repetitive, I’m enjoying reading his dark tales and learning about new ideas and new words while getting a picture of what life was like in the 1800s, and it’s nice to finally get to know a bit more about this author that has inspired so many others!
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