A Non-Review Recommendation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion

January 9, 2014January 7, 2014 / Carolyn O / 18 Comments

Let us assume, please, that we all agree Jane Austen is a genius and reading her books is an experience equivalent to eating chocolate bon-bons and sipping champagne (or Scotch, if you’re of my inclination) while the sun sets on a perfect late-spring day as a string quartet plays Bach on your mansion’s terrace.

Thus I will spare you discussion of why I love Jane Austen, which is pretty much why everyone else loves Jane Austen, and move on to the particular pleasures of Persuasion, her last completed novel.

Persuasion concerns Anne Elliot, a woman in her late twenties who once had an understanding with a young naval officer, an understanding that was given up under the well-meaning influence of a family friend, Lady Russell. In the intervening years Anne has not married and Captain Wentworth has made a name and fortune for himself; thanks to Anne’s father’s profligacy, the two meet again when Frederick’s sister and brother-in-law rent the Elliott estate. However, Frederick has not forgiven her for what he feels was a grievous error on her part, and as other romantic interests present themselves, it seems as if the two will never reconcile.

Persuasion is my favorite of Austen’s novels, and I limit myself to a reading every three years or so. What struck me on this reading — perhaps because I was reading To the Lighthouse at the same time — was the immense interiority of the novel — so much of the writing focuses on Anne’s emotions and reasoning. Akin more to Elinor Dashwood than Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse, Anne feels deeply but does not permit herself to give vent to those feelings. What distinguishes her from Fanny Price (I’ve never much cared for Fanny) is her sense of duty, her inward nature turned outward to comfort and help those around her, however undeserving they may be. In other words, Fanny comes across as a victim, acted upon by others, while Anne is fully-realized rational agent. Perhaps her age has something to do with her maturity and kindness (she is selfless, but not a martyr); she’s roughly ten years older than Austen’s other heroines.

In addition to Anne’s charms as a heroine, Persuasion also offers delightful bits and pieces of advice and food for thought. Here are a few of my favorites.

Still true of any two readers:

” [. . . ] and they walked together for some time, talking as before of Mr. Scott and Lord Byron, and still as unable, as before, and as unable as any other two readers, to think exactly alike of the merits of either [. . .]” (90)

Good for parents to keep in mind:

“When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort. This may be bad morality conclude with, but I believe it to be the truth.” (199)

To keep in mind during election years:

“Mr. Elliot was rational, discreet, polished, — but he was not open. There was never any burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others. This, to Anne, was a decided imperfection. Her early impressions were incurable. She prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.” (131)

How we book bloggers might describe ourselves:

” ‘Give him a book and he will read all day long.’ [. . . ] ‘He will sit poring over his book, and not know when a person speaks to him, or when one drops one’s scissors, or any thing that happens.'” (108)

And perhaps the greatest fictional love letter ever:

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in
F. W.” (191)

By the way, my favorite film adaptation of Persuasion is the 1995 film version with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds. It is, I think, the truest film adaptation of Austen I’ve ever seen.

What’s your favorite Austen novel? Have you read Persuasion? What did you think?

“After snowstorms my father / shoveled the driveway where it lay”

January 7, 2014January 7, 2014 / Carolyn O / 7 Comments

A tip o’ the hat is due to Ted Kooser and the American Life in Poetry project for this week’s poem, because I don’t think I would have found it otherwise. Thomas R. Moore’s “Removing the Dross” is a poem about snow shoveling, particularly apropos given the arctic freeze in North America this week.

The speaker’s father has a particular method of shoveling, so precise that it reminded me of a Hemingway hero’s expertise in camping. The imagery, diction, and rhythm of the poem come together in a particularly satisfying way.

Let me know what you think! Favorite lines or images?

What the Kids Are Reading: The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

January 2, 2014January 8, 2014 / Carolyn O / 24 Comments

I realize that I may be the last literate person to have read this novel since it was published two years ago this month. Generally speaking, I try to avoid anything filed under “What Teens Are Reading” at Barnes and Noble (yes, I was in there exchanging things), despite my occasional forays into YA. But The Fault in Our Stars has been so widely acclaimed that I felt safe joining the library wait list.

Sidebar: Was the term “YA” around when we were younger? I’m 29, for the record, and I don’t remember seeing “YA” as a teenager, although it’s possible that I missed it because I was pretentious enough then to turn up my nose at a wide swath of literature (What’s that you say? I’m still pretentious? I don’t want to bite my thumb at you, but . . . ) and hated being categorized as a “teen.” I did read a bunch of Judy Blume novels in grade school (Yes, grade school. My second grade teacher couldn’t figure out what to do with me during class reading time, so she handed me Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I was really confused, and a search through the bathroom cabinets didn’t help much.) I remember leafing through them in the library — to this day, I can’t really keep a straight face around anyone named Ralph — but I don’t remember how I found them.

My point, which got lost somewhere in there, is that I don’t see Forever . . . (don’t worry, didn’t read that one in second grade) shelved near the Boyles and Byatts these days, and maybe that’s a trend that’s been around for awhile. Then again, sometimes I can’t find Neil Gaiman books anywhere except the SF/F fantasy section, so maybe we should all band together and protest the isolation of genre fiction. Or do separate genre markers make it easier to find something along the lines of what you like?

But I digress.

Spoilers Ensue. You have been warned. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to read again.

I loved The Fault in Our Stars, even if it meant that I started my New Year by sobbing all over my favorite sweatshirt and causing my two-year-old to worry about Elmo’s health. It’s a testament to the writing that I knew just what was coming by page 18 (“Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the rest.”), but I still wanted to keep reading. Hazel and Augustus are hilarious, winning characters, perfectly imperfect, precocious but never precious. The book treats people with illnesses as people, which is rarer than it ought to be, and I thought the medical issues were handled well.

Here’s where the book first won me over: “There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer” (8). It’s the rare adolescent-centered book that fully acknowledges the burdens of parents, and this is one of them. I happen to be personally conversant with untimely death, and now, as a parent, I can tell you that, yes, being the parent would be worse.

I wonder, and I’d be pleased to know if you have the answer: Is this book as popular as boys as it is with girls? I know that it was mostly girls who read Twilight (tried some of that in an effort to get to know my students’ tastes: disaster.), but I can see how The Fault in Our Stars would appeal to boys, too.

As I read, part of my mind was engaged thinking about texts that I’d teach with The Fault in Our Stars, since it’s a commonly-read book among high school students and people entering college. It’s a dream of a book for English nerds, with tons of discussions about metaphors and books; Laura at Reading in Bed has a great post on the allusions in the book (and I agree with her critique about the sex scene too).

End of Spoilers.

Here’s a short list of books that I think would complement The Fault in Our Stars, not just from a teaching standpoint, but from a general reader’s standpoint too.

W;t, by Margaret Edson. A play about an English professor dying from ovarian cancer. Brilliant, beautiful, full of John Donne. I’ve taught it three or four times, and college students (freshmen to seniors) have loved it. There’s quite a bit here about how the medical establishment dehumanizes patients, and I think the de-emphasis on hospitals in The Fault in Our Stars would provide a good counterpoint and spur discussion about lenses in literature.

Gain, by Richard Powers. The best novel about cancer I’ve ever read (sorry, John Green). It’s dense, engaged with history and what it’s like to be human and sick. It both is and is not historical fiction, environmental fiction.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. If you missed this book, go read it immediately. It’s stunning. I won’t give away the plot because it’s so exquisitely rendered. Like The Fault in Our Stars, it features young adults facing circumstances entirely out of their control, and navigating though first loves at the same time.

What would you add to the list? What did you think of The Fault in Our Stars?

Reading While Pregnant: Or, “enough to love / to break your heart / forever”

December 31, 2013April 19, 2015 / Carolyn O / 12 Comments

I was nearly halfway through pregnancy at this time three years ago, and I remember feeling the baby kick for the first time around New Year’s Eve, which was also the same time I was reading one of the three books I strongly associate with being pregnant.

Reading while pregnant isn’t really different from reading while not-pregnant, I found, except I felt I should be more discriminating since I wouldn’t read as much right after the baby was born (true, in my experience), and also because I had to get up a lot more often. And while I generally remember my reading lists pretty well, most of the books I read during those many weeks went by in a haze, though I know there were quite a few. I was teaching intro-level Shakespeare and Readings in Drama at the time, so that’s a dozen right there, and of course I read novels and poetry on the side. Looking back, though, these are the three books that epitomized the whole experience of pregnancy for me.

One is the ubiquitous What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which was so awful and made me cry so often that my husband hid it from me around the end of the first trimester (for which I am profoundly thankful). Seriously, it’s the worst: fat-shaming and fear-inducing for starters. If you’re a pregnant person, there are far better options out there (try the Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy for the nitty-gritty health stuff, and the Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy for the “we’re-all-in-it-together” vibe, although if you read my edition from the late ’90s you’ll have to squeeze someone’s hand through the parts that hurt [ahem, assumption of shared privilege, ahem]).

The second is Wuthering Heights, which is the first book I read on an e-reader. My husband got me a Nook for my birthday about a month after I found out I was pregnant. Though I’ll always be a lady of the printed word (mostly because I like books as objects, and my eyes hurt when I look at screens for too long, but we can have that tussle another day, if we must), it did make reading one-handed while standing quite easy (also: great for reading while nursing). On the train and the bus to and from the university, I read about the unkindnesses that Cathy and Heathcliff inflict upon each other, and the harsh beauty of the moors. It wasn’t particularly uplifting, but it was distracting enough that for those forty-five minutes each way, I didn’t notice the sciatica or general discomfort associated with growing another human in one’s abdomen. And that’s all you want from your pregnancy reading sometimes: distraction.

[It should be noted, here, that I am of the variety of plumpness that made it difficult for people to tell whether I was fat or fat and pregnant for the first twenty-seven or so weeks out of my forty-two (yes, it was awful) weeks of pregnancy. People in Boston aren’t jerks who don’t offer seats to pregnant women. For the most part.]

The third book I associate with pregnancy, the one I was reading when the baby started kicking, is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Now, I came very late to the Harry Potter fan club; the books started to appear when I, as a young teenager, thought that Ayn Rand was the height of reading sophistication. (As you can tell, my salad days have come and gone.) When the Harry Potter movies came out, my dad and I would go see them on a Monday at the Shaker Square Cinema for five bucks a ticket, with free popcorn (we’re yankees to the core); we liked them quite a bit. As it turned out, I saw all the movies with my dad, eventually. But for many years we eschewed the books as “kid stuff.”

It wasn’t til I was pregnant that I decided I should read the series to preview it for the baby, figuring, perhaps wrongly, that kids in the 2020s will be reading the same stuff as kids in the late ’90s and early ’00s. It tells you something about my reasoning ability that I thought I should preview books meant for kids 8 and up while I was still pregnant. It’s not just me, though: Pregnancy does weird stuff to your brain.

My nesting instinct pretty much came down to books: The shower was book-themed (thanks, bookish friends!), and I bought (or borrowed/stole from my siblings) every children’s book I remember loving, from Miss Rumphius and The Story of Ferdinand all the way up to the Chronicles of Narnia and Charlotte’s Web and Anne of Green Gables — without reflecting that it would be years before the baby would be big enough to understand them.

I read that first Harry Potter book and immediately ordered the set. I read them so fast that winter (three years ago now) that the plots spun together, thrilled that these were books my baby would someday, barring catastrophe, grow up to read. They might be built of the fantastic, but they made all the promise of childhood after the misery of pregnancy seem real and attainable, and I loved them unabashedly and in earnest. While I’m not exactly sure I’m ready for our son to grow up, I can’t wait to read the books to him for myself (Mr. O read the first three to him to get him to sleep as an infant). Privet Drive is going to make his chores look easy, and even I would take gym class over Potions with Snape. Wait. No I wouldn’t. Scratch that. Sorry, kiddo. Gym class is the worst.

Harry Potter & a picture of our Baby O (now Mr. Baby, or H) on the day he was born.

Turns out that I’m impatient, so I read the whole series again over the Thanksgiving holidays, and whoa, nelly. They’re still wonderful, inventive while nodding to and borrowing from the best in other fantasy novels, and heartbreaking.

I didn’t know, the first time I read them, that our Baby O would be a son, but this time I couldn’t help but picture our little dude as a kid away from home, navigating the tricky staircases at Hogwarts, maybe making friends like Ron and Harry, and especially Hermione.

This is a your weekly poetry post, I promise, even though it’s taken me awhile to get here. This week we’re saying hello to a new year, and so please head on over to The Poetry Foundation to read Diane Di Prima’s “Song for Baby-O, Unborn.”

It’s the kind of poem that I imagine would have crossed Lily Potter’s mind sometime. It reaches for the future with eyes wide open to the deficiencies of the present, and the tangled power that is love.

Ye Olde Year in Review

December 30, 2013January 20, 2014 / Carolyn O / 17 Comments

I started Rosemary and Reading Glasses on January 1 this year. I’d blogged for a couple years about food and domestic bliss (along with my husband), but a long-term illness has meant that the food I eat is consistently boring and not write-up worthy.

At the time, my plan was to get myself writing again, and to fulfill my New Year’s resolution, which was to memorize one poem every week. I failed pretty spectacularly at that goal (more on this later), but along the way

a bunch of pretty great stuff has happened.

Friends! I’ve been so lucky to “meet” delightful, thoughtful people this year, people who love books. The only downside is that often you delightful people live states/countries/continents away, so chances of us meeting in real life aren’t too good. But if you’re ever Boston-bound (and you know who you are), let’s get a beer (or a cup of tea) and then go bookstore-hopping, shall we?

Engagement! I don’t know about you, but I always hated whole-class read-alouds in grade school and high school. But the whole reading-separately-together thing has been so much fun! I love seeing everyone’s Classics Club lists, and I liked my first read-along so much — even though the book was atrocious — that I’m hosting my own in 2014. (There’s still time to get in on it! Non-atrocious book, promise.)

Failure! Now, I know this one sounds weird, but here goes. The first ten weeks of my memorize-a-poem-a-week project went according to plan. The next ten weeks weren’t so smooth; I was cramming on Sunday nights to make my Monday memorization deadline. And then I got really sick and ended up in the hospital for ten days, and the whole project was kind of shot to hell. But you know what? It didn’t matter. I still picked a poem to think about and savor every week, even if I couldn’t memorize it. People still read the blog. It was ok. And then I signed myself up — publicly — for NaNoWriMo, and I didn’t finish that either! Guess what? Yep. The sky didn’t fall. Nobpdy reported me to the writing police, and I’m here to tell the tale.

Success! I used to consider not finishing a book a crushing personal failure. Well, maybe not crushing. Anyway. One of the side-effects of my failure episode this year was giving myself permission to put a book aside if I wasn’t enjoying it after thirty or forty pages. Not exactly revolutionary, but it’s a big step forward for me. Poetry brought me back to reading novels again, and I decided to read thirty this year, or a 300% increase from the year before (I’m the at-home parent of a 2 1/2-year-old. Enough said, I hope.). And I read thirty books. Then I read thirty-five more. That’s right, folks. I made it through 65 books this year! It’s not that the number matters (but I do feel pretty awesome), really, but that I thought about those books, wrote about most of them, and talked about them with friends in the blog-world and real-world.

Books! Yeah, I know. Of course. I’ve had my head buried in the seventeenth-century sand for so long that I lost track of contemporary fiction. And it’s wonderful! Even the books published just this year gave me a sense of the richness and breadth i’ve been missing out on. I’m not going to do a best-of-the-year list, because I don’t want to, really, but herewith I present a list of five books that have been flying under the radar this year and deserve more attention.

Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

Chloe Aridjis, Asunder

Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters

Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard

Jenny Uglow, The Pinecone

So, what’s next?

More Poetry! I’ve read 50+ individual poems this year, but only four full collections. That’s kind of lame for someone who considers herself a poetry person. I’m going for seven in 2014. Also, start looking forward to February, because I will be featuring super-sexy poems on Tuesdays. Mostly sexy poems by dead people, because I don’t like Valentine’s Day very much.

More Lists! People love lists, turns out. I only did one this year, and I’m not going to go all Buzzfeed on you next year, but expect a couple more lists in 2014.

More Parks & Rec posts! By far my most popular post this year was a Ron Swanson / Bobby Burns lovefest. So maybe I should write more of those.

A Readalong! Yes, I’ve plugged this one already, but here goes again! Read Paradise Lost this winter! It’s shorter than most novels and will give you some sweet vocab to impress your friends and colleagues before spring arrives.

More of the same! In 2014 you’ll still find poetry posts on Tuesdays and book reviews on Thursdays. I’m a creature of habit.

Thanks for reading this year, friends. It’s been a pleasure. Stay tuned tomorrow for the last poetry post of 2013.

Confidential to my brother: Happy birthday, Tom! You’re one of my favorite readers.

Anyone Want to Get Together and Talk About The Time Traveler’s Wife?

December 28, 2013December 29, 2013 / Carolyn O / 18 Comments

I can remember exactly when I heard about The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 mega-hit: it was summer 2004, in one of the dorms at BC. I was there for a summer course on the philosophy of Tolkien (see: nerd credentials, my), and my roommate told me it was her favorite book.

I don’t think I can tell you the favorite books of any of my other roommates, sadly, but this particular roommate went on to become one of my very best friends, so her recommendation has stuck with me for the last nine years and five months. Of course, now she’s gone and moved to Colorado, and she works nights, so I can’t call her up on any old afternoon to chat about the book.

Here’s the premise, for those of you who missed the big hullabaloo ten years ago: Clare and Henry are in love, but Henry suffers from a rare genetic disorder that causes him to time travel, involuntarily and without warning. He travels to the future and to the past, always landing naked (like the Terminator) and afraid, and not sure how long he’ll be gone from his present time. As you might suspect, Henry and Clare face some pretty weird challenges as they navigate their relationship.

What I liked best about the novel is its mix of genres: sci-fi, romance, domestic drama. Ms. Niffenegger’s writing is lively (though occasionally veering into cliche) and she has a knack for choosing quotations (Derek Walcott and A.S. Byatt both make appearances) that enhance the story. Thanks to her background in art, the scenes of Clare in her studio are some of the best in the book; I found myself wanting to learn more about contemporary paper-making and paper art.

The structure of the novel makes for a compulsive reading experience (also, it turns out that something Very Bad happens on my exact birthdate, so that was sort of weird and intriguing at the same time). It loosely follows Clare’s timeline, with tangents forward and backward as necessary. At one point, time is compared to a Möbius strip, an apt analogy; the future Henry is always part of Clare’s past, for example, and the present Henry and Clare cannot escape either the past or the future. Henry often feels helpless, not only because he cannot control his time traveling, but also because he cannot alter events. He might know about a terrible accident in the future, but he has no power, in his past, to change it. (On the other hand, he’s pretty handy with the stock market.)

Despite the genre-bending premise, The Time Traveler’s Wife is primarily a love story; the science part of the sci-fi doesn’t really hold water. Sure, genetics could explain the physical symptoms associated with Henry’s time displacement, but the actual time traveling as a genetic quirk? I’m not buying. (And that comes from a lady who can quote you Next Gen, chapter and verse.)

Ok, so here are the topics I want to talk to somebody (you?) about:

Henry’s the lit-nerd’s perfect guy, right? He’s a librarian, he speaks multiple languages, he’s tall dark and mysterious, he’s wicked sexy, he’s a bad-boy-turned-good-guy . . . I mean, really. Is he too perfect?

Wait, let me answer my first question with another question: Is Henry too damn paternalistic? All this withholding information from Clare (for her own good, of course) seems awfully condescending, and the implication that it’s ok because Clare has her own secrets doesn’t sit too well with me.

Is giving Clare a rich family lazy? My mother pointed out to me years ago that it’s easier for writers when characters are rich; you don’t have to write in what it’s like to have to forgo dinner out to pay the phone bill, or write about shopping clearance sales instead of waltzing into a boutique, or explain why someone is able to buy a house or fly to Orlando. She was commenting on movies (see: Nancy Meyers’s post-1990 oeuvre), but the point holds for novels, too, I think. Unless wealth and its effects are important to the plot or theme of the novel, making characters rich just seems lazy. Sure, Clare’s family’s property is so big that nobody notices her childhood chats with future-Henry, but why not put her on a ranch, or a farm, or a city apartment with parents who work long hours (or a single parent, for that matter)?

On a related note: What’s up with many of the non-white characters being household help? I grant that Kimy is a three-dimensional character, but she still deserves more prominent placement. Could have done without Celia’s characterization as a predatory lesbian, too. I think Ms. Niffenegger consciously tries to include non-white characters, but too often the attempt reads as tokenism.

And here’s a question with some spoiler material, so stop reading now if you want to be kept in the dark. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come back.

Why don’t Clare and Henry just adopt? Six miscarriages, at least one involving a massive transfusion? Adoption seems to be the sensible solution here. I HATE with a fiery passion Clare’s rationale for not adopting:

Clare says, “But that would be fake. It would be pretending.” She sits up, faces me, and I do the same.

“It would be a real baby, and it would be ours. What’s pretend about that?”

“I’m sick of pretending. We pretend all the time. I want to really do this.”

“We don’t pretend all the time. What are you talking about?”

“We pretend to be normal people, having normal lives! [. . . ]” (349-350)

It would be one thing if Clare apologized for this outburst (and for not really answering Henry’s question) and explained herself. Instead, her implication that adoption is somehow “pretend” is left hanging (Henry gets angry, leaves the house, and time travels), and in a feat of magical realism, a past Henry pops up and impregnates her. Pregnancy number seven is lucky, and she delivers a healthy baby, which reads to me as if the novel endorses Clare’s f’ed up analysis of the ontological status of adoption.

Safe to return, dear readers!

Despite these shortcomings, I found the novel fascinating, and, as you can tell, it gave me lots to think about. Have you read it? What did you think? And how was the movie?

Secret Santa . . . With a Bookish Twist

December 23, 2013 / Carolyn O / 15 Comments

Rick over at Another Book Blog came up with an excellent idea for those of us with bibliophilic tendencies: A book blog Secret Santa! No buying, no sending, just reading — it’s perfect. Rick drew names out of an interweb hat, and each blogger will (a) choose a book for another blog to read and (b) post about the book suggested to her/him on the suggester’s blog. If that sounds confusing, go check out Rick’s opening salvo.

Here’s who’ll be a-reading during the twelve days of Christmas:

Rick from Another Book Blog
Laura from Reading in Bed
Heather from Between the Covers
Rory from Fourth Street Review
CJ from Ebookclassics
and yours truly.

Rick’s already revealed that I’m his giftee (and I am so psyched to read the book he chose!), and I’m excited to say, with a trumpet fanfare you’ll need to imagine, that I’ve pulled

CJ from Ebookclassics

from the hat!

Now, I don’t “know” CJ that well, but her project (reading one hundred classics in e-book form) is totally rad, and, luckily for me, comes with a built-in list of titles that she’s read and means to read. I skimmed the list — it’s a great list — and was tempted by quite a few. I would love if someone would preview Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Madame Bovary for me, but I thought those were maybe a little weighty for this season of hope and good cheer. Then I was quite tempted by Persuasion, since I’m reading it myself right now, and it’s short, highly underrated (and under-read), and delightful. But then I saw that CJ’s read and blogged about Sense and Sensibility, so I thought she might want a change of pace. And thus, I came around to:

Dubliners is Joyce’s collection of short stories, a volume that ends with the sublime, wonderful, wintry, “The Dead.” I hope CJ thinks it’s the perfect Christmas present. Merry Christmas CJ! Can’t wait to host your review!