A dry, scholarly text, The Scarlet Letter charts this rise of the Latin Alphabet from it’s adoption in the Roman bureaucracy to it’s standardization in Western Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. It is, frankly, hard to justify why this book is on so many high school reading lists. The most glaring fault is that this book fails to feature any other letter in the alphabet. It’s just “A this” and “A that” for, like, 500 pages. Hawthorne also attempts to introduce color into his flawed theories, but doesn’t make it past the color red. He also tries desperately to ramp up the action later in the book by examining competing alphabets in the Indo-European language tree (such as the Cyrillic, Sanskrit and Greek alphabets), but fails to generate any tension that might keep the reader engaged. The etymology chapter is pretty weak as well.
If you really wanted to learn about the alphabet, I would instead recommend Eric Carle’s ABC. I don’t know who the author is, but they’re very thorough and concise, making it from “A” to “Z” in only 26 pages. It also features a menagerie of colors, not just red.
Suck on that, Hawthorne.
-Crappy Bookseller
