<p>Hanna’s list reminds me that one of the lamest endings I’ve read is in Snow Falling on Cedars. Talk about a cop-out.</p>
<p>I did know that about Dickens (after I read DC). Lots of authors kill off inconvenient characters. Look at poor Mrs. Rochester. Jean Rhys tried to “rescu e” her by writing The Wide Sargasso Sea. Which brings me to postcolonial literature and postcolonial lit crit. Can one read Mansfield Park in the same old way after Said?</p>
<p>Why would one want to read Mansfield Park in the same old way after Said? I think a “postcolonial” awareness adds another layer of richness to the experience of reading Austen. And it’s not as though that perspective diminishes Austen’s influence or attractiveness. See Bride and Prejudice.</p>
<p>
JHS,</p>
<p>Thanks for the kind words regarding my review of Cormac McCarthy.
<a href=“http://www.dartreview.com/archives/2007/01/12/the_other_side_of_paradise.php[/url]”>http://www.dartreview.com/archives/2007/01/12/the_other_side_of_paradise.php</a></p>
<p>Not having read any other novels by McCarthy prior to doing the review of “The Road” I had to review “The Road” as a stand alone novel. I was, however, aware that other reviewers were referring to McCarthy’s latest as being a bit thin within the context of his complete oeuvre. Nonetheless, I felt the book on its own to be one of the better novels I had come across last year; and I was after all reviewing a particular book in a particular year not relative to all books in all years. In fact, I felt that many reviewers were unnecessarily cynical in their approach to “The Road”—even if they had preferred any of his other books, to this one. </p>
<p>Anyhow, thanks.</p>
<p>Some time ago, one of my reviews made it on to cc and, the levels of tolerance being what they are, the spittle and venom was everywhere…eventually the thread had to be closed it had become such a mess of invective; over a book review, mind you.</p>
<p>JHS:</p>
<p>Very true. My question was purely rhetorical. I’d been thinking that among 20th century authors, there were a lot of ex-colonials. See the list of Booker Prize winners, for example. I’m still thinking that the CSM author was too wedded to pre-20th century literature.</p>
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</p>
<p>sjmom - you’re my kind of reader!</p>
<p>Hanna, TheMom substituted for your prof in enlightening me in the parallels between DC and Dickens wrt Dora et alia.</p>
<p>Coureur, I think I’d manage to slice the works in different directions, from novels of manners to trashy romances, etc. “Chick lit” throws ANNA KARENINA into the same pile as Danielle Steele, seems hardly sporting or fair. Though I am reminded that a Russian friend recently told me that most Americans think there is but one Russian writer, by name of Tolstoyevsky.</p>
<p>JHS, any anti-Christian sentiments in THE GOLDEN COMPASS weren’t enough to disturb me. I loved the first 3/4 fo TGC–the “look and feel” of the world & characters is terrific–and then the ending made me want to pitch the thing into the fireplace with its authors-convenience and deus ex machina manipulations. Ptui!!!</p>
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<p>And it’s not proper to call any of these slices “chick lit?” You still didn’t say what you call this genre or any of its component slices.</p>
<p>I put Anna Karenina in the same category as Emma Bovary. It’s not really about love and marriage in the same way that P&P, Sense and Sensibility are. Might as well call War & Peace chick lit or a romantic novel (does anyone re-read War and Peace for Tolstoy’s musings on history?). I do not think that Wuthering Heights or even Jane Eyre belong to quite the same category as P&P, despite the fact that they appeal to women more than to men.
Now, I should not have used the term chick lit in reference to works that I truly love. I do love Persuasion, though Sense and Sensibility offends my own sensibilities. The thought of an 18 year-old marrying a flannel-wearing 36-year old who is still pining after his lost love is weird. In fact, Marianne Dashwood is only a couple of years older than the by now pregnant daughter of the lost love.</p>
<p>Coureur, I wouldn’t call that pile any one thing. Imo, it’s a grouping without particular meaning or significance. I’d pull out trashy romances into one pile, novels of manners into another, etc.</p>
<p>Marite, Marianne Dashwood is another character that I have an urge to slap but I can’t help but think that was Austen’s intent…or would have been had she thought it about it in those terms. Otoh, I need to put up my scowl deflector if I call TheMom, who also leans strongly towards “sense,” “Eleanor.”
Otooh, I think Mr. Palmer is one of those characters that I wouldn’t mind playing on stage.</p>
<p>Your take on Col. Brandon provokes me to wonder what he’d do with Facebook, eh?</p>
<p>TheDad, your take on Mr. Palmer must have been influenced by Hugh Laurie. On paper he is not someone who is surlily suffering fools; he is just rather a jerk who redeems himself toward the end by showing that he is not completely self-absorbed, As for Eleanor, where is the sense in falling for the complete twit Ferrars? The more I think about it, the more depressing that novel is.</p>
<p>I agree, Marite, but I think it was you who mentioned liking Persuasion? This is my second favorite Austen. (close to first.)</p>
<p>Any George Eliot fans here? I adore Middlemarch!!!</p>
<p>Garland, I actually prefer Persuasion to P&P. It’s darker and not so funny, but there’s a poignancy, and not just in the interrupted romance, that’s not found in P&P. My favorite, however, will remain Stendhal.</p>
<p>I loved Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. And Vanity Fair.</p>
<p>But my favorite 19th Century biggies are probably Balzac and Dumas – Balzac for the really incisive social analysis that ranges a good deal farther beyond the drawing room than Austen, and Dumas because his sense of plot and situation are just so darn good.</p>
<p>Dumas? Well, yeah. But not over Flaubert. Agree with Balzac. He also wrote better than Dickens. But his take on women was, even in my teens, hard to swallow.</p>
<p>“Can one read Mansfield Park in the same old way after Said?”</p>
<p>Well, to me, Austen was “chick-lit” until I came to similar understandings that Said came to (though I didn’t get them from him.) I wanted to know where all the money for those balls and tea-parties and apartments in London and etc., etc., came from. It was totally foreign to my experience, and once (just once) I actually asked a high school teacher about it (we were all working class or near-working class kids in NYC at the time) and she was totally clueless (and seemed surprised that anyone would think to ask.)</p>
<p>The second question, which I couldn’t answer even after my “Said-moment”, was why marriages were becoming increasingly difficult?</p>
<p>Marx answered that one. ;)</p>
<p>My D, who LOVES to read - favorite author is Austen (even reading her in Spanish for fun!) - loves the Gossip Girls. She finds it lighthearted reading after reading all the heady stuff in college. She had to read 3 Dickens books in HS and hates him! Her comment is that it could have been said better in fewer words, but she understands because he was paid by the word so he repeats and repeats and drones on. I am a former Lit major, who read everything that was on OP’s list, and I enjoy mysteries. I do read great lit also, but like D, I like to read something that I don’t have to analyze, tear apart, or do some heavy thinking. Sometimes, the non-thinking, enjoyable reading is what we need. There is enough heaviness on the news without it having to permeate our reading all the time, as well. And, as a teacher, I am happy when kids read - ANYTHING! That said, I also feel that the reading lists need to be beefed up to include more classics. These kids will never understand allusions that crop up in life because they haven’t read the original work. Calling someone a Walter Mitty if you haven’t read it…well…makes it difficult.</p>
<p>ejr1:
On S’s bookshelf Nabokov, Kafka and Joyce peacefully coexist with Harry Potter.</p>
<p>Marite: guilty (re Palmer). However, anent Stendahl, I read THE RED AND THE BLACK a couple of years after Al Gore, in one of his more doofusey answers to a question during the 2000 presidential debates, said that it was his favorite book. I wouldn’t toss it in the fireplace but whathisname was a goosed twit. Di gustibus.</p>
<p>EJR, my D alternates reading Garth Nix with Italo Calvino…both show good taste, imo.</p>
<p>Persuasion is my favorite Austen. Though P&P comes close behind because it’s so wonderfully quotable. I’m afraid Stendahl was ruined for me, by my having to read it for AP French, a course for which I was woefully unprepared. All I remember was some horrible open book exam where I had to compare his first love affair to his second, only I hadn’t gotten to the second. (Why I didn’t have the sense to read the book in Cliffnotes or English I can’t imagine.) One lived in the city, the other in the country. One was blond the other a brunette. That’s all I remember about The Red and the Black. I keep meaning to give it another try, now that I can actually read the language!</p>
<p>I adored Middlemarch at 19, I tried to read it again in my 30s and got bogged down. Oh well.</p>