Recent Buys & the Ladies of Grace Adieu

I always manage to find a few things. I love Colette and try to grab her books when I see them. I got The Pure and the Impure and The Innocent Libertine from her. I'm about halfway through The Innocent Libertine and really enjoying it. Her stuff is pretty sexy, but without the shame of reading 50 Shades of Grey. I'll review it in a few days probably.

Michael Chabon's Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands for the man and I will probably end up reading it too. I really enjoyed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and have just picked up any of his books I find for cheap since.

The final book in the pile is Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu. I'll do a short review of it here since I powered through it hours after buying it. Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell which I have not read, but now want to.

From the back cover, this book is reviewed by Spectator as so: "These tales read as if Jane Austen had rewritten the Brothers Grimm ... wonderful!" I think this sums up the book very well. There are eight beautiful little stories that mix the romanticism of Austen with the the magic of Grimm. The land of Faerie is someplace you can cross over to on your way to tea with the King and end up stuck for months until your love frees you by smashing a hornet's nest.

Clarke has a real flair for writing dialogue and sucked me in. She also has that way of describing a character to you totally with just a phrase or two.

"The governess was not much liked in the village. She was too tall, too fond of books, too grave, and, a curious thing, never smiled unless there was something to smile at."

If you are a fellow fan of Austen, but like a little more darkness, this is book is for you.

Things that really matter

I picked up this book due to a recommendation I heard from Lexicon Valley, a Slate podcast about language which is super interesting. A Jane Austen Education follows William Weresiewicz as he works on his dissertation. He begins graduate school disliking Austen basically on principal, preferring more modern and complicated works like Ulysses. This is a view I have gotten from a lot of people (mostly men) who think that Austen is boring.

Each chapter covers one of Austen's books and is tied to how Weresiewicz grows from a young adult into a well rounded person. The transition that he goes through is especially interesting to me since I feel that I am in the same age of change as he was. For example, this really hit home for me:

"When you're young - when you're in high school and college and even your early twenties - you take your friends for granted. Of course they'll always be there. You take friends for granted. Why would you ever have trouble making new ones? Then all of a sudden - and it can feel very sudden indeed - everybody's gone. Some have moved, some have married, everyone's busy, and the crowd of potential friends by which you've always been surrounded has evaporated." 

One thing I was grateful about was that despite these books being around for forever and having so many adaptations of them, Weresiewicz never gives away the ending to any of them. Which is great because I have a confession to make. I, lover of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen in general, have never read two of her books. Mansfield Park and Persuasion have just never made it onto my selves and after reading this book, I am committed to buying, reading, and loving them. I also think I might dust of an Austen biography that has been sitting on my selves for a long time.

A full Austen loving convert, Weresiewicz ties in thoughtful pieces of critical reading of her works and information about her life in a way that I think would be accessible even to those who aren't Austen crazy. I highly suggest it.

from politics, it was an easy step to silence

Continuing on my Austen binge, I picked up Northanger Abbey. This is one of those books that I've always felt a little weird about not reading. I own a lot of books and read a lot and yet I feel that there are some "classics" that are just not on my radar. Case in point, I didn't pick up Wurthering Heights until last year and I have yet to read anything other than Great Expectations by Dickens. I'm working on it people.

I've made no secret that I love Austen. Pride and Prejudice is in my top five favorites and Emma would be somewhere in the top tier as well (I'm now trying to figure out what my other top five are and top 100 and so on). That being said, I did not like Nothanger Abbey. It just did not do it for me. Here's why:

Catherine and Isabella have such a fake friendship that everyone can see but Catherine. Isabella is such a parody of a flirtatious woman and an insincere friend that it made me cringe to read about her. Her speeches on how important friendship meant to her contrasted with her abandoning Catherine in favor of any man seemed like they were meant to be humorous but just came off disappointing me. Perhaps if I too had been fooled to think that Isabella actually cared for Catherine, then I would have cared about Isabella in some way. I was not surprised by anything Isabella did, no matter how shocking it appeared to Catherine.

Catherine herself was a big issue for me. She's pure, innocent and about as naive as they come. That I could handle if not for the fact that she doesn't seem to be acting like a woman in that day and age should in regard to men. In other Austin novels, women who are not rich are always at least aware that they need to get a man to marry them before they become a horrible burden and shame on their parents. Men and marriage occupies a lot of their thinking. Catherine seems to be oblivious to it. She is not a rich woman, though yes not poor either, and so should be concerned about getting married. Yet the girl couldn't pick up a hint from a guy if he dropped it in her lap. Which they do, a lot. Yes, she is smitten with Tinley and may be in love with him, but we the reader never really get to know this until very late in the novel. I felt like Austen had Catherine tip-toe around the thought of marriage . This fact of Catherine's obliviousness to men and marriage bothered me the most about this book.

There are moments in Northanger Abbey where you can clearly tell that the writer is brilliant, but, in the face of her other works, this is not a great book.

Two quotes I rather liked:

"Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."

"To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive."

Pride and Prejudice

What can I say about this book that has not already been said?

I turned to this book because I feel like I'm reading so many books that are new to me, and every now and then I need a familar face. As I've said in my Kindle review, this book has a lot of sentimental value to me. I love this book a lot. I would have a hard time believing that there are people out there who haven't read it (I'm sure there are, but it's more like I don't want to believe it) so I don't really feel like I need to recap the plot. Mr. Darcy is dreamboat.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." ~ I actually had a friend quote this at me the other day in regards to some guy we know and it pretty much made me idolize her.

There are too many lines I have underlined and too many comments I wrote in the margins for me to recap here. I need to go drink a cup of tea.