Honestly, I hadn't been quite comfortable about choosing any topics for my journal, so it came to my mind to introduce something for this purpose. This something, this 'anything [what the journal should be about]' is going to be a novel (so far), The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I'd like to tell I'm quite fond of handwriting (you'll be absolutely unsure about it upon having a look, though), but I would digitalize the journal anyway, and that'd be extra work. Certainly, I'm not going to write strictly about the novel, but about all the things coming to my mind while reading it.
The first surprise was its vocabulary. Ten new words per page! I've been concentrating, let's say, only on British English, ever since I've got seriously interested in English. That was when I had been studying at SEAS ELTE for two semesters, 4 years ago.
All the text is filled with words I'm not used to (however, they're definitely not solely AmE words), it's something I didn't experience with Bram Stoker, for example, I was fairly comfortable with his style. (On the other hand, I must admit I've never read a whole book in English.) It might be as well, that Stoker and some others weren't that demanding about their language, talking about a kind of 'quality pulp fiction' from the XIX. century.
I'm wondering if it's only a slight 'culture shock' for the beginning.
True, it's not the easiest language that Hawthorne uses, but it is fascinating once you get into it. But it's pre-Civil War. Sometime about then the language used in writing became much easier to read, particularly in AE, though some of this is true for BE also.
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