Lost In Austen

I've spent the last 5 days in Maine, doing nothing but reading, sleeping, eating, and looking for moose (I saw a baby mooseling, by the way, very exciting). Now, you should know that as I live not far from The Strand, I have a stack of books about as tall as I am that I got for 48 cents and have not gotten around to reading. So I brought about 15 books with me, and finished about half.

Two of the books that were most interesting to me were Pride and Prescience and The Jane Austen Book Club. They were incredibly different, and I was drawn to aspects of both.



I loved the characters in The Jane Austen Book Club. One of the things I found most amusing and enjoyable was the fact that it was written in first person, as though one of the members of the book club was telling the story, although the person mentions every member of the club by first name, seldom revealing who is speaking. Only through a story is the narrator given up, and even then you are left wondering if that's really who narrated the entire novel. It's a very curious thing.

I was pretty unhappy with the ending though. It was definitely an Austen ending, that's for sure, but there's no need to refer to that same point in the course of the book. Any Janeite would pick it up for his or herself. This brings me to my other disappointment. I won't give specifics in case you want to read the book, or even watch the movie, but I was extremely bothered by the way the Sylvia/Daniel and Allegra/Corinne relationships were wrapped up. I felt that it was unrealistic and degrading to the members of the club who were involved in these relationships. Also, there were a few storylines that I felt never fully developed, and felt like hooks thrown in to grab the reader, yet never amounted to anything. It was rather disappointing. However, I loved the change in Prudie's spirits toward the end, and Jocelyn was a mystery I rather enjoyed unraveling. Overall, it was good, but not great. My favorite part was actually after the novel ended, where the author quoted other famed writers' opinions of Jane. Look up Mark Twain's if you get a chance...it's quite deep :)



Carrie Bebris' take on what happened after the Darcy's wedding in Pride and Prejudice was a total beach read, in a good way. It was light, witty, and very quick. Even though it was a mystery, it wasn't supremely out of the realm of my imagination that Elizabeth Bennet (now Darcy) would be curious enough to find herself in the midst of this chaos. I was a little baffled by the sci-fi/fantasy twist it took though. Very un-Jane, but it amused me nonetheless, and I definitely understood how that made it suitable for Tor, and it wasn't as noticeable during my read-through as much as after. Still I can't really recall a Jane Austen novel with supernatural elements. But I'd definitely read the rest of the series.



And I made it through a whole post without referencing vampires :)