Through the Internet Archive’s audio offerings, I found LibriVox has a free audio version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which some of you might remember I’m currently reading. The reader is Moira Fogarty.
Visit the site to download the book, or check out this embedded version:
The subtitle of my post refers to my current need to read something light and fun that I don’t have to think about too hard. And Breaking Dawn has just been released. One of my students has been after me to read it already, so I’m running out right now and buying it. I still want to finish Persuasion and Who Murdered Chaucer? However, as I inferred, my brain is fried, and I need to take a break from the serious reading.
Speaking of Persuasion, it strikes me as I read that my favorite parts of Austen’s books often involve her most annoying characters: Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet, Miss Bates, the Thorpes, and now Mary (Anne Elliot’s whiny sister). She just cracks me up.
I have had good response to a query about a book club at work, so perhaps my quest to find grown up with whom I can discuss literature may be fulfilled soon.
See you on the other side of the latest vampire romance. Oh, and as usual, blogging will be light due to the fact that I return for my Master’s degree on Monday, and I’m already so busy with work that I’m wondering how that will work out. Wish me luck and send good time management vibes in my direction.
I spent this morning watching Becoming Jane, and even though I know I might get my Janeite card taken away for saying this, I liked it. Oh, I know it’s inaccurate, but it made for a good story. Of course, I just love watching Austen-related movies because of the clothes. I was surely born at the wrong time. Take a look at some of the stills in this movie.
I just love, love, love Jane Austen. At this point, I have read all but two of her novels: Persuasion and Mansfield Park. I have started Persuasion twice and set aside for reasons I can’t remember. I suspect it might be partly due to the fact that I’ve seen the excellent adaptation starring Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds. I loved that movie, and it didn’t surprise me when I took a recent quiz and discovered Anne Elliot is the Austen heroine I am most like. I felt that when I watched the movie, too. Still, it’s shameful not to have finished the book, and I am turning back to it again. I plan to read Mansfield Park as well, but I’m not sure when. I’m definitely due for re-reads of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
I love immersing myself in her world, and if you do, too, you might check out Jane Austen’s World and Austen Blog. Of course, there are many more wonderful Jane Austen’s blogs in their blogrolls, too, but I have to get going and that means I need to wrap up this post.
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is the story of the naive Catherine Morland. Catherine accompanies Mr. and Mrs. Allen, family friends, to Bath and meets and befriends Isabella Thorpe, the daughter of one of Mrs. Allen’s school friends. Catherine also meets Henry Tilney and is instantly smitten. Catherine also befriends Tilney’s sister Eleanor and secures an invitation to visit the Tilneys’ home Northanger Abbey from General Tilney, Henry and Eleanor’s father.
Every synopsis of Northanger Abbey that I’ve read has been misleading. Even the title is misleading. I was misled into believing the entirety, or at least a large portion of the book would take place at the imposing Northanger Abbey, ancestral home of the Tilneys. I judge about half the book is actually set at Northanger Abbey. Also, most synopses of the book that I’ve read reference Catherine Morland’s romantic imagination convincing her that a strange gothic history has taken place at Northanger Abbey, but that episode occupies only a small part of the plot of the novel — a few chapters at best.
I don’t think this novel is so much a parody or satire of gothic novels as it is the story of how a young girl loses her naiveté. It was a quick, enjoyable read, and I liked it better than Emma, though I don’t think it quite tops Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. Catherine was a likable character, and I enjoyed the dialogue in the novel (as always in Austen’s writing).
I read Northanger Abbey as part of the Historical Fiction Challenge. At this point, my progress in the challenge stands thusly:
I don’t think I’ll pick up Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell again next, but I’m not sure what I will read, as I expecting a bunch of books in the mail and would like to choose from among them; which one I choose depends on which arrives first. I’ll update once I have the books in hand and have made a decision.
This morning, DailyLit sent me my final 191st installment of Jane Austen’s Emma, which I read just a few moments ago. Upon finishing the book, I have to say that while I love DailyLit and the idea behind it, daily subscriptions were perhaps not the best way to read this particular novel (and perhaps Jane Austen in general — I am not sure). Austen has a subtlety and requires, I think, a great deal of concentration from her reader. Reading this novel over the course of about six months made it hard for me to remember some of the events. Of course, I could have had installments sent more quickly by requesting them (by default, the subscriptions will not be sent any more frequently than once a day). A second problem I had in receiving the book this way is that it was very poorly transcribed. On several occasions, my transcription cut off in the middle of someone’s speech or would even end as someone was about to say something (even cutting off at a comma instead of a period). I found this maddening and most of the time either requested the next installment or had to go back and re-read the end of the previous one. Another fault in the transcription were grammar errors — the possessive “hers” was rendered “her’s” on several occasions in the text.
As for the story, I have previously read Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and am currently reading Northanger Abbey (I have also attempted Persuasion twice). Of the novels with which I am familiar, I have to say Emma contains my least favorite storyline and characters. I never really managed to quite like Emma. She seemed to me to be quite shallow and snobby. I did like Mr. Knightley, but I fail to see what he saw in Emma. Mrs. Elton was hilarious, as Austen’s most annoying characters typically are. Still, even though I didn’t enjoy the novel as much as I typically enjoy Austen, it was an entertaining read. I had seen Clueless, and it was interesting to see how closely Amy Heckerling followed her source material.
Not one soul commented to tell me which Dickens novel I should read of the three: Great Expectations, David Copperfield, or A Tale of Two Cities. Therefore, I used the only means of divination I could think of and asked my seven-year-old daughter Maggie, who has no investment in my choice except that perhaps the title of the third sounds like a Garfield movie. And of course that’s the one she chose for me.
Meanwhile, I have discovered yet another use for my Goodreads account in addition to keeping a record of all the books I have read and am currently reading. Up until the last couple of days, my “to-read” bookshelf has held only the couple of books that were on my immediate list of books I wanted to read. I have begun cataloging the books I find interesting so I won’t forget about them later, and I am finding that to be really helpful for me. My mother has for years kept a notebook with a list of books she find interesting and checks them off as she acquires them, so consider my Goodreads account my notebook.
I am certainly not first out of the starting gate with the news that Entertainment Weekly has published a list of 100 “new classics” — supposedly the best reads of the last 25 years. If that’s true, I have read depressingly few of them:
Quite a few of the books mentioned are on my to-read list, and I have heard a lot of these books praised. However, I have to say that I don’t think some of them should be considered “classics.” Popular, maybe, but that’s hardly the same thing.
I finished reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I was originally supposed to read it in high school, but I quickly fell behind our class’s reading schedule, and before I knew it, the unit was over and assessment was done. I donated my copy to my teacher, who gave us extra credit for book donations because she was trying to grow her classroom library. Alas, I didn’t return to the book until this year. I loved it!
I think my favorite part of the book was the setting. I could so clearly see Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and all the moors surrounding them. In a way, the setting was almost a character, too. I found the characters, for the most part, easy to dislike, yet strangely sympathetic. Just when I had truly written Heathcliff off as totally evil, Nelly jumps in and reminds the reader of his boyhood, and her concern for him near the end of his life awakened my own. I disliked Linton intensely, and I found myself annoyed with Cathy for her sympathy for him. Then, I would feel guilty because he was, after all, slowly dying, and who knows how that altered his character (not to mention contempt from his father and the loss of his mother). And speaking of Cathy, her treatment of poor lovesick Hareton I found horrid. What a forgiving sort he turned out to be. In short, one thing I think Brontë did quite well is paint characters who while flawed and perhaps even reprehensible, still manage to evoke the reader’s sympathy.
I think my favorite character was the storyteller Nelly Dean. She spoke her mind when she felt the need, and I sensed a deep respect for her from the other characters. I did wonder a couple of times why she would dish the family dirt to a complete stranger (Mr. Lockwood). At first, she struck me as gossipy. Later, when I decided that wasn’t exactly the case, I was at a loss as to determine why she would tell the story. I came to the conclusion that she was lonely for the first part of the story. After Heathcliff died and Mr. Lockwood returned, I decided she wanted the story preserved in some manner.
Mr. Lockwood is an interesting character. Through Nelly, he knows more about the true events of the whole story than some of the principal characters, and he is, I think, deeply affected by the story (witness his visit to the graves of Catherine, Heathcliff, and Edgar Linton).
I’m not sure if this will make sense, but this book struck me as so quintessentially English — I couldn’t imagine it in another setting. I imagine that many other British novels and plays could (and indeed, in the case of Shakespeare especially) have been re-imagined in different locations. Wuthering Heights, however, belongs to the moors of Yorkshire.
I will have to think carefully about how to teach this book so that my own students won’t fall into the trap I did. This reader’s guide Web site is excellent, and if you are interested in Wuthering Heights, you might wish to check it out.
I have to take a break from the Historical Fiction Challenge to read some summer reading so I can create assessments for my students. For the record, I planned to read the following books (titles stricken through I have completed):
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is long, but Northanger Abbey is fairly short. I think I can manage to finish the challenge by October, and perhaps the idea that I need to finish the challenge will compel me to finish the former — I put it aside because it was taking me forever, and I wanted to read some other things.
My next book is Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, a story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
As I read Wuthering Heights, I find myself somewhat awed by Emily Brontë’s characterization and storytelling, especially given her own sister Charlotte’s assertion (in the 1850 introduction to Wuthering Heights) that Emily didn’t have the opportunity to travel widely and learn a great deal about different types of people. Also, given her age (29) when the novel was completed, her accomplishment is all the more astonishing.
I think many people might read Charlotte’s introduction and find her criticisms somewhat unfair, but they struck me for their even-handedness. Many of us might be tempted to see only good in a sister’s only novel and greatest accomplishment, especially after that sister’s death, but Charlotte seems to me to be quite a keen critic. I’m not sure I agree with her criticisms yet (I think I’ll finish the book first), but I found them interesting nonetheless.
I found an excellent resource for readers of Wuthering Heights. I especially like the photographs and artwork, which help me visualize the setting (not that Brontë is any slouch at description).
I am totally loving Wuthering Heights. So why have I not picked it up until now? What prevented me from finishing it in high school? I guess books come back to us when we’re ready for them… if we’re ready for them.
What about you? Has this ever happened to you with a book? Tell me the story in the comments.
The Telegraph has a feature on the “50 Best Cult Books” (via So Many Books). I thought the comments on the feature were interesting, given I had never heard of most of the books mentioned by commenters, and as they are supposed to be cult books, it stands to reason I’d have heard of at least some of them. I don’t pretend to be up on the latest all the time, but I’m no slouch when it comes to books. Of the books mentioned in the article, I have read the following:
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I find it peculiar that the Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings were not included. I should think that both fit the article’s rather vague definition of cult books.
In non-related news, I increased the font on this blog slightly, but found that doing it too much broke my template. It would seem that the font size would need to be tweaked in a number of places, which is a project that will have to wait for the summer. If you have trouble reading the font, you can try increasing the font in your browser. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it would seem the creator of my template or theme didn’t take eyestrain into consideration. Look for some improvements in a couple of months.
Image credit: Nick Today.
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