Read with the book club of Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone podcast.

I definitely got more out of it this time around than I did in high school. Interesting to see the distance between Hawthorne and the characters he's writing about. 

It's hard to take the story seriously in terms of characters. It's constantly popping the reader up to the level of allegory or message, in a somewhat heavy-handed way. Chillingworth in particular is such a caricature of a villain.

Podcasters resisted discussing symbolism or character layers, and therefore didn't have much to say about the book. Lol