P.D. James tries fanfic

Death Comes to Pemberley - P.D. James (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)

I had heard some fairly negative buzz about this novel - a murder mystery set in the world of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, some years after its happy ending. But that rarely stops me when it comes to P&P takeoffs, so here I am.

And while it was not perhaps the strongest of novels, and the whodunit seemed weird at best, I then looked at James' bio and discovered that she was over 90 when the book was published. And all was forgiven. Damn, if I am around at 90 (and I hope I am) I want to be clever enough to put together this novel.

Plot summary: Elizabeth & Darcy are happily wed, and happily estranged from Lydia & Wickham. Until Lydia shows up screaming bloody murder, and then end up ensconced in a murder trial. I think I've been ruined by too much media that has to have thrilling climaxes, because for all that there's a murder and a trial and verdicts and much excitement, it all seems rather calm and (spoiler alert, I guess) neither Elizabeth nor Darcy find themselves in a showdown with the real killer, waiting for some deux ex machina rescue. Which, in retrospect, was rather nice.

James also plays homage to other Austen novels, namechecking characters from at least two other novels. If there were others, I missed them and want very much to have them brought to my attention. That was cute, although sorta silly. And I didn't much take to her renditions of some beloved characters, although I suppose her visions of them are just as likely to be accurate as my own.

All in all, it made for pleasant, if somewhat incongruous, poolside reading.

Lizzie Bennet in high school

Prom & Prejudice - Elizabeth Eulberg (Point, 2011)


I was reading some RA (readers' advisory) thing about new young adult fiction when I came across this title. And the description made me howl. At work. Lovely. My library didn't purchase it, but I finally came across one that did, and here we go.

I can't figure out if it's even possible to read this book without knowing the source material. Certainly it can't be as amusing. Longbourn is no longer the home of the Bennets, but instead a very posh New England boarding school, where prom is a BFD. Lizzie is a scholarship student. Jane & Lydia are sisters, but not Elizabeth's sisters. Bingley & Darcy attend the neighboring boys' school, named - naturally - Pemberley. Other references to the book pop up in unexpected places.

Eulberg has a difficult task adapting P&P for modern teens. The grand themes of the love story are as apt as ever: pride, an unwillingness to change initial impressions, misunderstanding, stubbornness about who we think we are and what we think we want.... all of these get in the way of true happiness. But actions and attitudes that make sense in the early 1800s seem bizarre in today's climate. Bingley & his sister, for example. Are brothers really that persuadable? And Lydia.... you can have a wild child today (easy enough) but how do you demonstrate how humiliating that wildness is? Can it really bring shame on a family?

Anyway, it's cute. But I'm afraid I would have hated it had I read it as a teen.

I'm re-reading again

Reading a book on the computer is a strange experience still to me. Especially when it's a book set in the early nineteenth century. Anyway, yay Jane Austen. Yay Persuasion.

Austen was REGENCY. This is VICTORIAN.

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell (Penguin Books, 1995 - orig. serialized 1854-55)

A month or two ago, I found out that my friend Jason was going to be speaking at an upcoming service at the church I attend. His topic? Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and her Unitarian background and the Unitarian themes in her work. My response? BOOKS. Yay!

But I had never actually heard of Gaskell, and wanted to read something by her. And then I forgot, but then his talk got postponed to today, so a couple weeks ago we had the following conversation (paraphrased):

Me: If I were to read just one Elizabeth Gaskell book before you do your thing, which should I read?
Jason: Actually, there's a really good BBC mini-series of North and South.
Me: (offended) What? You think I can't handle reading the book?!?
Jason: (in mild distress) No. It's just... well, the book is long and I don't know if you'll like it, etc.
Me: How about I actually read the book and decide for myself?
[Karen: I love this moment. The writer telling the librarian to watch the movie instead of reading the book.]

I actually understand Jason's reluctance. Recommending books is a slightly treacherous task. Especially when you find yourself recommending a book that is 150 years old and over 400 pages long. But I asked, so I took all the responsibility on myself. It would have been my own problem had I not liked it.

Except I didn't not like it. It was so good. (Today is italics day, btw.) Now that I've taken up all this space with prologue, I will be brief about the actual review. You can go read it yourself - or watch the mini-series, which I saw half of last night. (Book is more fully realized - shock! - but I will admit that Richard Armitage is totally hotter than my imaginary Mr. Thornton.)

So a few of the main things: the title refers to the collision of Northern (industrial) and Southern (more genteel and also pastoral) mores during the period. Margaret (South) and her family move to a mill town when her father gives up his vicarage as a result of his religious doubts. Margaret, as an outsider, finds much to dislike in the North (and vice versa) but grows more fond of the region and its principles through her relationships with a millworker and his dying daughter as well as a mill owner, who is also her father's pupil. There is a strike, and a violent riot, and a love story, and lots to think about philosophically. Or you can just think about the love story, which is quite a bit like Pride & Prejudice if we had actually gotten to know Mr. Darcy a little better. (Also had Elizabeth Bennet been a little less Lizzy-esque and more like the rest of Austen's heroes. But Jason has reminded me multiple times that this is more than a whole generation later, so I really ought to stop making the comparison.)

But I will say that if you like either Austen or Dickens, you will find something to like in North and South. Also, yay for the book, for Gaskell, for Jason, and for the BBC.

Sense and Sensibility, updated

The Three Weissmanns of Westport - Cathleen Schine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

I decided to read this modern retelling of S&S after hearing about it here and there, and then having it pop up on Slate's Double-X Book Club. I held off on listening to the podcast for 4 months until I could read the book, and finally it's all come to pass.

I found myself underwhelmed both by the book and the discussion (more on the latter later). It's clever, and I loved identifying the characters who pop up and remembering their Austenian counterparts. Marianne and Elinor as 5o y.o. women is an interesting twist, and Betty Weissmann is a far more fun Mrs. Dashwood. But then things get all wonky in the second half - and I can't even discuss it here without engaging in major spoilers.

And this is what I wanted to hear about on the book club podcast. How much can you change the template of Austen's original? Does it matter if the original seems utterly implausible in today's world? Or is Schine arguing that there might have been a better way to plot Austen all along? I don't know, and the Double-X ladies skirted around this, when for me it was the central point. Oh well. Also, they referred to the novel as chick-lit - or rather "hen lit" (clever) - which jagged me off on a tangent about genre fiction and the very specific potential definitions for women's genre fiction. For me, this is definitely a woman's novel, but it's not chick lit, which has very specific conventions about the female protagonists as well as the plot.

Oh well. The novel was still a fun read, even if occasionally infuriating, and it was often funny. A couple memorable moments:
Miranda the literary memoir agent has a client who writes about her (fake) childhood in Rhodesia. This was entirely too close to Alexandra Fuller for me and I was confused as to what Schine might have been trying to say (the Slate ladies noticed this too).

Annie the librarian through her sister's eyes: "Miranda sometimes thought of Annie as a kind of desiccated opium addict, stretched out in a smoky, sweet-smelling den with her fictional strangers, cut off from the noisy circus of life, uncaring, inaccessible, eyes closed in someone else's dream." Harsh.

There are young twins named Juliet and Ophelia. NO. No matter how pretentious you are, you do not name both of your girls after Shakespearean heroines that go a little (or a lot) crazy and off themselves.

But mainly I was caught up with trying to work out how I felt about the plot.

Jane Austen lives in my head

According to Jane - Marilyn Brant (Kensington Books, 2009)

I am part of the problem. There are too many Austen-inspired books out there. Imagined sequels (mostly to Pride & Prejudice), modern updates of her plots, modern updates of her plots starring protagonists who are explicitly working though their own relationship with Austen and how she has impacted this expectations regarding love and romance. Enough already!!!!

Except I read them. Not all the time, but I read them. So I am to blame.

But it's not fair to pile all this on Brant, whose book I came across while at the library looking for lighter reading to balance 2666. (Compare to my friend, who chose to balance the same novel with Don DeLillo and Umberto Eco.)

Here's the conceit: Ellie has a close personal relationship with Jane Austen, who "appears" in her head just as her high school teacher assigns Pride & Prejudice and spends the next 20 years as a chatty, eccentric aunt. (One who provides, among other things, romantic advice that Ellie seems most often just to ignore.) As she goes through, trying to find The One, Ellie finds that sometimes Austen is right (re: family in particular) and sometimes Austen is wrong, and that the right guy might be the wrong guy, and vice versa.

Where the book truly succeeds is in set pieces: a pair of high school dances, a tryst in a college dorm, a series of scenes with the hot Russian, a party right before graduation, and the occasional run-in with the guy who broke Ellie's heart when they were kids. They are funny and ridiculous, and identifiable. What they aren't is especially cohesive. And honestly, I'm not sure where Jane in the Brain brings to the table. But that happens sometimes.

I could definitely see this on screen. It has some memorable scenes that a young comedic actress would drool over. And lots of "awwww, don't they see they are perfect for one another" moments. What I can't decide though, is if I'd leave Jane in or let her go...

Regency Vacation

Austenland - Shannon Hale
New York: Bloomsbury, 2007

I hadn't been to the library in ages. (Like since February probably.) So I was really excited a couple weeks ago to trek up to my local branch and see what from my "to read" list was in stock. And I was in the mood to find a book that I could read that afternoon. Hence, Austenland. (And how awesome was it when two hours later my friend e-mails and says, "My mom says hi. She wants to know what you're reading," and I had to respond, "um, Jane Austen fan lit.")

This was cute though, and a lovely weekend afternoon read. Jane (not the name I would have chosen, but whatevs) is about my age, and totally identifiable to a reader like me. She's single, relatively successful, and might be slightly obsessed with Mr. Darcy. Her great-aunt decides that Austen is keeping Jane from finding happiness in the real world, and bequeaths a vacation to an English resort where guests live in an Austen novel. With actors, and love affairs, and all sorts of ridiculousness. Jane goes, with the plan of getting Mr. Darcy out of her system forever, and being able to move on. And really? Do I have to say any more of the plot?

Another nice touch was that each chapter begins with the tale of one of Jane's loves, which run the gamut from the boy who kissed her in pre-school to her former fiance.

While nothing inspired by P&P can ever possibly be Bridget Jones, much less the real thing, this was a charming effort.

New books are just more fun?

See? Just the other day I wrote about how I have a hard time reading the books I actually own. And today I come across a Booklist blog on the same topic. Based on this WSJ article and its comments, Keir Graff muses on the to-read pile.

And yet I still buy and hoard books. I’ve joked–joked–that I’ll have to quit my job as a book reviewer in order to read books. But given that I won’t, I imagine I’ll spend my first months of retirement doing math, dividing the number of pages per day I can read into the number of years I think I have left–and weeding my thousands of books to read accordingly.

Jesus, I hadn't even thought about doing that math. I need to get on this.

But it's mildly reassuring to remember that I'm not alone, b/c we all have more books to read than we ever will read. And we all let books sit for far too long. I think I might be unusual in that I am more likely to use the "But I will like it so much I just want to save it for a little longer" excuse. But in the end, it is still an excuse. And one that gives me time for re-reading Emma and watching deliciously bad teen shows.

AWWWW! I have one of those too.

Cats and books go well together. But you knew that already.

Also, I've been re-reading books in between writing papers. Like comfort food, in tough times I turn to Emma and Helen Fielding.

Okay Twilight

So the Facebook application "Pieces of Flair" may have gotten its inspiration from Office Space, but I sometimes wonder if it would manage to keep going were it not for Twilight, Stephenie Meyer's crazy-popular young adult vampire series. (I would post some, but it kept making the margins all funny, and also some of them seem to need spoiler alerts attached. Suffice it to say, "Team Edward" "I'm in love with a fictional vampire" and "I'm sending this to you because I needed more points for Twilight flair" are popular.)

I don't remember when/why I decided I would have to get around to reading these. Maybe it had to do with my teens. Maybe it was my way of punishing myself for all the times I have mocked my mom for her vampire craze. Or some sort of cruel irony since I missed the last young adult novel phenomenon that was Harry Potter. Anyway, doesn't really matter. The point is, last Friday I came home from the library, big book in hand, and only wondering a little if the librarian was smirking at me.

Twilight is back at the library, so I don't have a copy nearby to help with this post. (On the other hand, I do have New Moon, a fact about which I am not proud.) It is a ridiculously fast read, by the way. I am sure that someone could do a better recap than this, but here we go: Bella moves from sunny Phoenix to rainy Forks, WA to live with her dad. And she falls in love with a vampire, who may or may not want to eat her. And hijinx ensue. Well, not exactly.

To my mind, clearly the best part of the novel is the "will they or won't they?" aspect to Bella and Edward's relationship. I believe that Meyer knows her Jane Austen well, and was not surprised when Bella breaks out a copy of the collected novels. Edward is very much the Austen hero: wicked smart, extremely honorable, and tortured by his own imperfections. (This may be a coincidence, but as in Austen, any declarations of love are also oddly embarrassing for this reader, who feels both as if she is intruding on something private and wanting to correct the lovers - er, are you sure you want to say it that way?) Yet, unlike legions of Facebook users, I don't feel about Edward the way I feel about Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley. (And given that the character is 17 going on 107 or whatever, that's probably not a bad thing.)

So, as far as teen girls go, I totally get it. (Do teen guys read Twilight? Anyone have statistics for me?) Since the protagonists are teens, I imagine it has limited adult appeal. Vampire buffs can get their fix from other series, and romantics will probably seek out something with more sex. But it's awfully charming, and a little addictive - hence Book 2 on my couch and Book 3 somewhere in transit between libraries. I will try to put off Book 4, since really? There has to be delayed gratification somewhere along the way.

Bewitched by Beginner's Greek

It really is the best word I can think of - bewitched. I wasn't even sure I liked James Collins' novel while I was reading it, but I just could not put it down. He manipulated my emotions perfectly, so that I was utterly invested in the outcome of the novel.

Peter and Holly fall in love as seatmates on a cross-country flight, but Peter loses her number, killing the romance before it has a chance to flower. Until fate brings them back together, except now she's with his best friend. Cheesy, I know. Except it works. One thing that particularly pleased me as Collins laid out the scenario was that he skipped the re-encounter. We jump from a heart-stricken Peter looking desperately for the lost number, to him three years after Holly has returned to his life. The meeting happens in flashbacks. A lot of important moments in the novel happen in flashbacks. And we spend a lot of time in various characters' heads, seeing how they see themselves and the starcrossed couple. Holly though? We don't really meet her until page 280, by which point I'm ravenous for her to become more than a cipher onto which others attach their own aspirations.

The rarefied air in which the characters move can be a little annoying - um, why am I not that rich and clever? - but forgivable in the same while Jane Austen & Edith Wharton's settings are forgivable. And like Austen, Collins loves skewering self-interest and hypocrisy. But also like her, he is gentle about it. No one tends to fall very hard or very far.

In fact, therein lies a central theme of the story: "[...] here she was setting off to grab all the love and happiness she could get. He hoped she would succeed. Whenever good people who were weak and timid showed strength and got things that bad, arrogant people always had handed to them, Peter was moved." Indeed.

Book Awards, So Cal style (and other updates)

A reunion, a car accident, and a cold later....

Erin is back with reading updates.

I re-read Jane Austen's Persuasion last week (for the book club). I think Anne Elliott is a mysterious character: not as vivacious as Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse, but not as much of a mouse as Fanny Price. She remains, yet, a bit of a cipher in relation to the strong personalities around her. But Austen remains as witty, and comfortable, and biting, and evocative as ever.

Another book that's been on my list won at the 2006 Southern California Booksellers Association awards: Literacy and Longing in L.A., by Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack. It's supposed to be readerly chick lit, and I'm looking forward to it as a light escape and a reminder that other people in this city are also obsessed with books.

Meme, or, How I Learned a New Word Today

Until this afternoon, meme was one of those words (like trope and singularity had once been) that I vaguely knew but mostly dismissed as pretention. Until I got tagged by greenLAgirl, accused of falling for a pyramid scheme by Michael, and figured it was time I got an official definition. Hooray for Dictionary.com which built on Michael's expanded definition of "chain letter/thought virus" and explained that a meme was from same Latin root as "mime" and is "a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." Like a gene, except of ideas.

Anyway, but I believe I was tagged to talk about my literary tastes, not my fondness for etymology. So, without further ado:

A book that changed my life
The Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga. Friends have challenged this one, but I read it at the exactly the right moment, in the right place.

A book I’ve read more than once
Emma, by Jane Austen. Possibly my all-time favorite book.

A book I’d take with me if I were stuck on a desert island
I am leaning toward Tolstoy, and War and Peace for the epic sweep. But I would also consider The Bible (King James), since I haven't read much of it and I'd have the time to consider a lot of stories.

A book that made me laugh
Anything by Helen Fielding - I am particularly fond of two that I know made me laugh aloud in public: Cause Celeb and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

A book that made me cry
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. That book tore me apart inside.

A book that I wish had been written
My dissertation? It was going to be on life behind the lines (i.e. where they sent all the promising students and most of the government) in Soviet Union during WWII.

A book that I wish had never been written
So many books have inspired hatred and violence - I could choose one of them. But I won't, because I don't seem to be able to find it in me to wish a book unwritten.

A book I’ve been meaning to read
I've had Herodotus' Histories on the backburner since I got through half of it the first week of my graduate program. Also at least 30 others.

I’m currently reading
In addition to my pile of New Yorkers, I have begun Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee.

Mr. Library (better known to some as the voice behind Vibes Watch) has graciously consented to be tagged. And I am realizing that my blogroll is pretty limited. So.... help me build it up, yo. I recognize that Rahul is probably above this, but just in case, I'll try tagging him too. As well as HH, whose i8 I just discovered. Will you come to LA and cook for me?