Jane Austen

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This week I finished Persuasion by Jane Austen, and finished the project I started with a group on Litsy to read all of her works in the order they were written. It was glorious. If you’ve never started a project like this with a favorite author I highly recommend it. It was very eye opening to see how her writing changed over time even as themes and characters repeated. I’m going to miss Jane, but I have dozens of rewrites, continuations, and non fiction studies to read over the next few months.

Les Miserables and the Serieal Reader App

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I can’t believe I read the whole thing…

Thanks to Serial Reader I was able to reach my long held goal of reading Les Miserables. I first tried in print, but the book was so big I couldn’t carry it on the metro or read it in bed. Next I tried audio but it didn’t hold my attention. Finally someone told me about Serial Reader, and for 233 days I got 8-15 minute chunks of this classic sent to me by app, and eventually I finished the whole book!

(Truth be told I didn’t like the book that much, but I’m glad I read it.)

I will definitely go this way again if I decide to take on another classic chunkster!

I Feel You Emma

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In Emma Mr. Knightley complains about Emma and her long, well developed reading lists created at the expense of actual reading:

“Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen many a great lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through- and very good lists they were- very well chosen, and very neatly arranged- sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule.”
— Emma by Jane Austen

For me summer is a great season of drawing up lists of books I will never read. There is so much temptation with summer reading guides stuffing my mailbox every day. But what Mr. Knightley will never understand is that for some of us making these lists is almost as much fun and nearly as rewarding as doing the reading itself.

Here I sit in my office with my shelves literally overflowing with books I bought last summer that I still haven’t read wondering what’s new this summer. And you know what? Mr. Knightley probably wouldn’t like it, but it sure makes me happy.

My Jane Austen Year

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Virginia State Arboretum

Virginia State Arboretum

Sometime last year I joined a group that reads a chapter of Jane Austen a day. We started with Sense and Sensibility and kept going. Now we’re all the way to Emma, my favorite. But even the books I didn’t love I loved reading because isn’t the Jane Austen life the quarantine life we all wished we were living? Having tea with our bubble, taking walks in the shrubbery, and everything turns out okay in the end?

It has impacted my life too. Now every time Zoom tells me I have a poor connection I don’t rage about my WiFi, I hear it in a Jane Austen voice. “Poor connection.” And I think yes, all of these people on Zoom are poor connections. I should be doing something better.

When I walk with my kids in a beautiful location like the one pictured above I have been know to walk ahead of them while they talk about Minecraft so I can think about Mr. Darcy or whatever. I imagine getting dressed up in my petticoats and muslin and walking through the paths, and the worst thing that can happen to me is that it rains and I need to spend a week at Netherfield recovering.

Thank you Jane Austen for writing those books all those years ago that have kept me company this year. You made a bleak year seem a little less bleak.

A Bookish Hike: Mt. Greylock

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Tributes to famous authors dot the summit

Tributes to famous authors dot the summit

If you’re a bookish hiker and are looking for a fall foliage pilgrimage you can’t do much better than Mt. Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusetts.

Mt. Greylock has been an inspiration for many writers over the years. Nathaniel Hawthorne mentioned it in his short story Ethan Brand. Herman Melville was said to have decided to write about whales when he saw the snow covered slope of the mountain out his window. And more recently, J.K. Rowling set Ilvermorny, the North American school of witchcraft and wizardry in the there.

There’s an auto road to the top, but driving means you’d miss out on hiking a beautiful stretch of the Appalachian Trail. There is of course the foliage that New England is known for, but you also get to hike through the only taiga-boreal forest in the state. In English this means there are many beautiful pine and spruce trees.

The War Memorial on top of Mt. Greylock

The War Memorial on top of Mt. Greylock

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Austen in August

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I am excited to take part in this year's Austen in August on the Roof Beam Reader blog. This is my first time taking part in this event, and I'm looking forward to immersing myself in all things Austen.

If you have a blog you have until July 31 to sign up. If you'd rather follow along on Twitter the hashtag is #AusteninAugustRBR.

This is a great way to wrap up summer reading, isn't it?

[REVIEW]: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

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I put off reading Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier for years because for some reason I thought it was a re-telling of Jane Eyre from the 1980's. Rebecca, it turns out, is a gothic novel, but it has nothing to do with Jane Eyre.

It does, however, have that sense of something's just not right like Jane Eyre does. It's that creepy feeling we love to indulge in this time of year. It should be a dream come true- poor girl marries rich man and gets to live like royalty at an English country estate by the sea. But we all know it never turns out all right for the down trodden shy girl.

When the twist comes you kind of suspect it, but it still knocks the breath out of your body. And the ending. Oh, the ending. I don't want to give anything away here, but I dare you to read the ending without immediately going back to the front of the book to read it again. I'll just say it's not the romantic ending that we somehow feel dirty about because he kept his wife in an attic ending that we got in Jane Eyre.

I'm so glad I finally read Rebecca, and I can't rule out reading it again next year around this time.

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I linked this post to Jenn's Bookshelves Murder, Monsters & Mayhem -- a collection of creepy books perfect for this time of year.

Happy birthday, Gatsby

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Last weekend The Great Gatsby turned 90. Now I don't pick favorite books, but if I had to Gatsby would be in consideration for top dog. I love the concise descriptions -  they tell you so much with just a few words.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
”Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
“It takes two to make an accident.”

Eight classics I want to read in 2016

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I'm in the middle of a multi-year attempt to read all of the classics I missed (or didn't pay enough attention to) in high school. Here are the 8 I've assigned myself to read in 2016.

You can click on any of the images above to see a description on amazon.com.

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