Reading and Editing Class

Today I had two classes at English school. They are "Advanced Reading" and "Introduction to Editing".

I don't get used to go to school weekday in the morning, so I was a little bit late for the reading class. In this class, we're reading extracts from English literature. We have to read it in the class, understand what it says on the spot, and analyze it if possible. Today we read the extract from "The Return of the Native" by Thomas Hardy.

He seems like a pessimistic man. The teacher said that everyone dies in the end. But he said he liked his novel because it made him think anything is fine compared with this miserable, dismal story. It seems that the auther depicts the scenery of Wessex (e.g. heath) with beautiful writing, and says no one can avoid their fate. Mmm... I want to read it in Japanese first, then I want to try it in English if possible.
http://www1.odn.ne.jp/~cci32280/PBThomasHardy.htm#TOP
http://www.geocities.jp/m_dolphinh/kaigai/hardy.htm

Next week we'll read "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson. Actually I've never read through any English novel in English until now. I'd like to try one novel at least in this term.

In the afternoon, there was the editing class. The text book is "The Chicago Manual of Style". This is not a book to read, so we just use it to understand the correct writing style. First we'll learn how to use punctuations. There're so many punctuations. For example,

apostrophe ( ', ’ )
brackets ( ), [ ], { }, ⟨ ⟩
colon ( : )
comma ( , )
dashes ( ‒, –, —, ― )
ellipsis ( …, ... )
exclamation mark ( ! )
full stop/period ( . )
guillemets ( « » )
hyphen ( -, ‐ )
interpunct ( · )
question mark ( ? )
quotation marks ( "', ‘ ’, “ ” )
semicolon ( ; )
slash/solidus ( / )

We have to use these punctuations properly when we write something in English. It seems boring to learn the basic rules, but it must be a great help later.