In Which I Once Again Fail to Read Jane Austen
Several things coincided this past weekend:
And I found myself for the third time in the past three decades trying to read Pride and Prejudice. Austen is one of my father's favorite authors, for one thing; this year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the book's publication for another; and a writer known as bookplayer over on FiMFiction, the giant My Little Pony fanfiction site, had just posted a blog entry about how she was reading the book for the first time and couldn't put it down even though she knew that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy were gonna get together at the end.
I knew the novel's larger story, having heard most of the BBC mini-series version of it when I was in the computer room putting my comics together and Dad was in the front room watching it on TV. So I figured what the heck? Fourth time's the charm!
Well, turns out it wasn't. I got further in this time than I ever have before, but a technical difficulty stopped me cold right in the middle of chapter eight. It's the part where Jane's lying sick and asleep upstairs, and Lizzy comes down to join the others in the parlor. The scene there has six characters in it, and over the course of several pages, Austen threw me completely for a loop three times: she would give one character a line of dialogue, give one to a second character, give one to a third, and then have a fourth line sitting there unattributed--and each time this happened, I was completely unable to figure out which character was supposed to have spoken the unattributed line. And by the time I'd gone back and figured out who was speaking, I'd forgotten what they were all talking about...
So back the book went onto Dad's bookshelf. Maybe in another 10 years, I'll have clevered up enough to try again.
Mike
And I found myself for the third time in the past three decades trying to read Pride and Prejudice. Austen is one of my father's favorite authors, for one thing; this year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the book's publication for another; and a writer known as bookplayer over on FiMFiction, the giant My Little Pony fanfiction site, had just posted a blog entry about how she was reading the book for the first time and couldn't put it down even though she knew that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy were gonna get together at the end.
I knew the novel's larger story, having heard most of the BBC mini-series version of it when I was in the computer room putting my comics together and Dad was in the front room watching it on TV. So I figured what the heck? Fourth time's the charm!
Well, turns out it wasn't. I got further in this time than I ever have before, but a technical difficulty stopped me cold right in the middle of chapter eight. It's the part where Jane's lying sick and asleep upstairs, and Lizzy comes down to join the others in the parlor. The scene there has six characters in it, and over the course of several pages, Austen threw me completely for a loop three times: she would give one character a line of dialogue, give one to a second character, give one to a third, and then have a fourth line sitting there unattributed--and each time this happened, I was completely unable to figure out which character was supposed to have spoken the unattributed line. And by the time I'd gone back and figured out who was speaking, I'd forgotten what they were all talking about...
So back the book went onto Dad's bookshelf. Maybe in another 10 years, I'll have clevered up enough to try again.
Mike