Jane Austen

For the next blogs, I will be going through these alphabetically with some of my favorite novels. Looking down the line, I realize that I probably need to reread a lot of these to recall why they ended up in the greatest hits section of my bookshelf.

The "A" authors must begin with Jane Austen, so prolific in her characters, her satires of her contemporary society, and her Romantic inclinations surfacing from beneath the witty surface.

If you were part of AP Lang ever, you know that we read the opening chapters of Pride and Prejudice and its recent version Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. For those of you delving into the world of Austen, that combination is an excellent course - very accessible and quite fun to look comparatively at the two milieus side-by-side.

I was turned onto Jane Austen and here plethora of incredible novels by the "Austen Renaissance" that occurred in film-making circa 1995-1996, which would be Emma Thompson's fabulous Sense and Sensibility, Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma, its modern adaptation Clueless, and, the best of all, the BBC version of Pride & Prejudice with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.

In order of Jane Austen: The Complete Novels, here are snippets of the plots - in the order I think I read them:

• Pride & Prejudice - her most famed novel, a tale of 5 sisters, 2 rich gentlemen, and the society that proclaims "it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" to exhibit the faulty reasoning behind that system all the while creating the magnetic connection between Miss Elizabeth Bennet (Prejudice) and Mr. Darcy (Pride). The BBC miniseries is so accurate to this novel - it takes all of the wit and energy and makes what seems quite simple (the marriage rituals of mid to upper class British folks) into a dynamic chess game of manners and mores. 
• Sense & Sensibility - as with the former novel, this one also connects abstract ideas to characters via Elinor (Sense) & Marianne (Sensibility) Dashwood, two sisters with different philosophies of life and both having relationship trouble. Whether it is the film or the novel, both look at how both extremes don't work well to emotional survival, that one should find a medium between the two, or at least that's how I see it. 
• Emma - here Austen creates a well-intentioned, matchmaking protagonist who actually is quite blind to her own feelings and relationships. Emma is a light-hearted romp; her conflicts are minor and more for teaching our herione about her own selfishness to gain further maturity for her eventual partner.
• Mansfield Park - this one differs in that its main protagonist, Fanny, is a more of an outsider and presented without as much wit and voice and some of her other Austen leads. I personally like the novel and its key/locked gate motif; it definitely shows the flaws in the upper class world that Fanny's relative inhabit and how morally unadvanced those staying in Mansfield Park happen to be. 
• Northanger Abbey - love, love this text and its satire of Gothic fiction. The main character wants to live in a novel - the first line of the text is "No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine." Unfortunately, through Austen's plot, the recognition that life is not a novel brings Catherine Morland into maturity.
• Persuasion - I never got into Persuasion in general although I should probably reread it now that I'm older. As a teenager, it wasn't as attractive to read about a woman who was a spinster who broke an engagement with a man and then years later has a second chance with him. I always felt there was a melancholy to this text that the other ones did not have.
• Lady Susan - this is an epistolary novel (vocab to learn = a text in letters/diary form) with widow Lady Susan and her daughter and all the hijinks that occur in their visits.

Carol Goodman - Literary Mysteries

If you like mysteries, especially those that are highly literate, I recommend the Carol Goodman texts that you can read about here: CG text summaries, which are listed from most recent to eldest in nature. There is quite a variety of plots, so I feel there is something for almost everyone who wants to read in the genre. I have read seven of the novels so far and in sequential order of publication if you want to follow my path. 

I first read The Lake of Dead Languages about 15 years ago, and became entranced by the storyline, the emphasis on language, and the writing style. After that experience, I read The Seduction of Water, and had the same connection to the text, which also brought in literary tropes too. I've read all of the novels through Arcadia Falls and will definitely have to get my hands on the last five - I have been slacking on reading her works!

Tolstoy

As with the idea that you are either an Austen or a Bronte fan, so goes the idea with the great Russian authors of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. With his epic nature and Victorian-era sensibility, I fall in the Tolstoy camp.

Anna Karenina is a mammoth novel, one not to be picked up by the casual reader. While its title suggests that Anna Karenina is the main character, she is only one half of the book's focus with Levin the other protagonist seeking to figure out his life, romantic inclinations, and past in a classified, judgmental Russia. His part can sometimes be boring - a lot of info regarding agricultural in nineteenth century Russia - but he brings forth a juxtaposition to the upper-class societal world Anna populates. Back to Anna, she is married to a boring man with a young son when she falls in love with Vronsky, a seductive military man. Her decisions regarding her child, her husband, and her lover become the dramatic parts of the text, leading to the train motif that occurs at the beginning and end of the novel. When I used to teach characterization, I would use the first train chapter as an example and would analogize these characters to volcanoes: most maintaining dormancy to stay in societal favor while some would erupt, causing mass chaos.

I first read Anna Karenina as an independent novel analysis during my second semester of college. I chose it because the movie version was coming out (there is a theme to why I read stuff). I remember reading the book for the first time in April, sitting under the crab apple tree blooming with its pretty pink petals and looking up to see a pure blue sky above. At (almost) nineteen reading about Anna and her want of love and freedom, I completely rooted for her and wanted her to dump her husband and all. The last time I read the novel, in my late thirties, I couldn't believe the selfishness of a mother choosing lust over her child. Perhaps that is what great literature should be - something that changes just as we do over the course of our lives.

Anna Karenina is my third favorite novel, so I highly recommend it to those of you who are ready for epic Russian literature. If you're not ready for that commitment yet, at least you know the gist of the plot and, if you show up to a Scholar Quiz practice, can appreciate the "Chug a Chug a Choo Choo" that the team does whenever a question arises about the novel.

I also find a modern version of the novel, What Ever Happened to Anna K by Irina Reyn, a fascinating update to the same situation. It's not as long and developed as the Russian text it emulates, but it brings all of the same choices to light.