Bookish Thoughts

I have to admit, I was never really a fan of the choose your own adventure books that everyone seemed to love when we were kids. I was to cautious to properly appreciate them. So many of the branches led to horrific deaths, and I didn't like those endings. I'd quickly find the single happy (safe, boring) ending and then sit there smugly while my friends recounted the various horribly consequences of their choices. I completely missed the point. Or maybe those books just weren't for me. But a chose-your-own romance? Where every ending is a guaranteed happily ever after? That's something I can get behind. My Lady's Choosing  is a loving parody or romance novels and the women who read them. Everything is heightened. The protagonist/reader falls in love at the drop of a hat and switches her affections to the next potential love interest just as easily. It was a lot of fun to read, and to zoom through all the different romance tropes and backtracking from each new ha...

I'll admit that it took me several starts to actually get into Jane Austen's Persuasion . It takes a bit to get in the right mindset to absorb the language in the book, and I must have read the first page 4 or 5 times before deciding it wasn't the right time and picking up something else. I finally forced myself to read it by bringing it on a 7 hour flight, and I'm really glad I did. Anne Eliot may just be my favorite of all of Austen's protagonists. This is probably because she's more mature than the rest, but she takes all of their best qualities and adds a few of her own. She's kind and considerate without being a pushover. Well, she was a pushover in her early years and that caused all of her problems, so she's grown out of it. She's perceptive in a way Emma and Lizzie fail to be, picking up on what all of Captain Wentworth's varying moods and interactions mean. And she's patient. She's so incredibly patient and so com...

The Three Musketeers was a lot of fun, and a good book to read on vacation. But it was also completely absurd. Everyone in this book is a ridiculous idiot. They fight duels at the drop of a hat or a handkerchief. They share everything, but they also keep crucial parts of their lives secret. They honestly seem to cause at least half of their own problems and fix everything with either swords or guns. And no matter how fast they come into money, they seem to spend it faster and spend large chunks of the book destitute. The plot was certainly fun and entertaining, once it kicked in. But I just barely cared about any of these characters. The only one I came close to rooting for was Milady, because she tended to have the clearest motivations and the most direct plans to achieve her goals. But she was also doomed from the start, because of the genre of the book, so it was hard to get attached to even her. I would have had a harder time sticking with this book under differ...

The Nanny Diaries is not great literature. But it is fun and light and exactly the palate cleanser I need after binging on Harry Dresden for a few weeks. The book follows Nanny, a senior at NYU, as she takes care of four-year-old Grayer X. She finds herself juggling Mrs. X's impossible demands with her knowledge of Mr. X's affair, and eventually the demands of his mistress as well. All the while she is attempting to shield Grayer from his parents, finish her thesis so she can graduate, and negotiate a blossoming relationship with one of the X's neighbors. There isn't a lot to this book. It's a fun look at the insanity of the incredibly wealthy. Mostly it made me appreciate my own life and work a lot more, as I'm not trying to juggle a slew of absolutely ridiculous demands. But the ending is rather abrupt and leaves a lot of loose ends. The greatest part about reading this book is my discovery that they made a movie out of it starring Scarlet...

This is my first attempt at Shakespeare in a non-classroom setting. I've read several plays before now ( Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Leer, and King John ), but they were all for assignments. And they were all really hard to get through. I have a tendency to get lost in the rhythm of Shakespeare's language. It flows so well that, without even realizing it, I'll have read two pages and retained nothing. I'll be so eager to finish a line that I won't even realize it's switched characters. I have difficulty keeping track of who's talking because that interrupts the flow of the language. To get around this, I used to go through and highlight each character in a different color before reading so I'd have a visual cue to keep me on track. But since I didn't want to do that to my fancy Complete Works (or carry that beast of a book around), I never got around to any plays that hadn't been assigned. Then Joss Whedon decided to make a fil...

Pride and Prejudice is a great book. Reading it made me really happy. That may be because I know the story so well. Though I've only read the book once before, I've seen the movie tons of times. The one with Keira Knightley. I adore the cinematography, especially in the party scenes. So I knew exactly what was coming at each turn. But this time through, I gained a better appreciation of Darcy's evolving feelings for Elizabeth. I hadn't really picked up on it in my first read, but the way he starts to fall from her almost from the beginning is well-executed. Of course, if he'd begun to fall for her from the beginning, they could have saved a whole lot of confusion. But then there wouldn't be a book. Really, this is a classic for a reason. Jane Austen is a master of the romantic comedy. You know the characters will all get a happy ending; it's just a matter of watching them get there. And that journey is a lot of fun.