Happy Birthday! I very much approve of your requested gift -- so much that I may make the same request when my birthday comes.
Meanwhile, I've just been reading Jane Austen's Emma for the first time (after reading Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice also for the first time)... and although the foreword suggests it's widely considered Austen's most mature and skillfully-crafted novel, without the inconsistancies of the two more popular ones, I did not find it so. I found the pacing slow, the characters puppetlike, the heroine unlikeably silly, the 'revelations' of the plot all too obvious yet without that comfortable satisfaction of service to a larger theme or archetype that sometimes, to me at least, excuses predictability. And worst, I felt Austen's occasionally wit was put to poor use, turned against characters for whom I believe the reader is meant to feel sympathy, and omitted or overused like a bludgeon in circumstances of tedious absurdity that a little sharp humor might have enlivened. Nonetheless, I couldn't help but empathize with some of the characters and read on in the hope that eventually they all might find some suitable and satisfying resolution. And it was very good to read at bedtime, just engaging enough to entertain, but with nothing to rouse so much preoccupation that I couldn't get to sleep. I suppose someone who prefers their romance with a tinge of soap-operaticness and an extremely slow build would find it rewarding.
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Date: 2012-10-30 02:51 pm (UTC)I very much approve of your requested gift -- so much that I may make the same request when my birthday comes.
Meanwhile, I've just been reading Jane Austen's Emma for the first time (after reading Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice also for the first time)... and although the foreword suggests it's widely considered Austen's most mature and skillfully-crafted novel, without the inconsistancies of the two more popular ones, I did not find it so. I found the pacing slow, the characters puppetlike, the heroine unlikeably silly, the 'revelations' of the plot all too obvious yet without that comfortable satisfaction of service to a larger theme or archetype that sometimes, to me at least, excuses predictability. And worst, I felt Austen's occasionally wit was put to poor use, turned against characters for whom I believe the reader is meant to feel sympathy, and omitted or overused like a bludgeon in circumstances of tedious absurdity that a little sharp humor might have enlivened. Nonetheless, I couldn't help but empathize with some of the characters and read on in the hope that eventually they all might find some suitable and satisfying resolution. And it was very good to read at bedtime, just engaging enough to entertain, but with nothing to rouse so much preoccupation that I couldn't get to sleep. I suppose someone who prefers their romance with a tinge of soap-operaticness and an extremely slow build would find it rewarding.