Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Oddly, I've never read this one before. It made its way into the same bucket as The Wizard of Oz during my childhood: I'd seen the movie, so I didn't need to read it.* (I did read the several dozen Oz books that came after the first one! But not the first one, because I'd seen the movie and that was good enough.**) But with Pride and Prejudice, it was even more pronounced: I hadn't seen "the" movie; I'd seen a good dozen or more of them! And read a bunch of tumblr-meta about the book. And... And...

And the book proved very familiar! I knew all of the beats, and many of the famous passages! But every once in a while there'd be a scene that I couldn't recall having seen in any adaptation--for instance, the one with Miss Bingley trying to annoy Mr Darcy into giving her attention as he writes letters. A delightful scene! That I couldn't recall ever having seen adapted! So there was definitely more nuance and detail on the page than I had osmosed over the decades.

And yet not that much more detail. I think this is the first time that I've ever read the book after seeing a movie adaptation, where I discovered I already knew what was going to happen on pretty much every page.

Still worth reading! Austen's prose is a delight, as always. And of course I was reading specifically for Colonel Fitzwilliam, who is mostly Character Not Appearing in the adaptations anyway. But for a book I'd never read before? It felt eerily like a book I had read before.


Alexandre Dumas (trans. by Anonymous), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1846)

Exactly the opposite experience! I knew there was a long imprisonment in the Chateau d'If, and thought I knew that he eventually dug his way out with a teaspoon, but that was it. Everything in here was new to me. phoenixfalls, who has loved this book since childhood, quizzed me early on as to what I thought the book was about. "Adventure novel," I said. "Lots of swashbuckling and swordfighting and shit."

Spoiler: Unless I have forgotten something, there are exactly zero swordfights in this novel. Also, no swashbuckling to speak of, unless we count the intellectual swashbuckling of masterminding a multiple-decade revenge scheme with an absurd number of moving parts. Very sexy of him, that.

I read this as part of a one-chapter-a-day read-along, and enjoyed that experience very much--well, until I neared the end, and said "fuck that" and read six chapters a day until I finished it. (The read-along is still winding up as we speak.) I will say that even at a chapter a day -- which is a good clip! -- there was a section in the middle when there were Too Many Characters*** to keep track of, and I was fighting for my life to keep sorted who was whose daughter, engaged to whom, and also what everybody's name was now. At one point I had to put it down for two weeks to read another time-sensitive thing, and when I picked it up again, I needed to use SparkNotes to get myself oriented again, I was so lost. How the hell people managed when this was serialized weekly, I have no idea.

Some things I especially liked: ( spoilers ahoy! )

All in all, a very satisfying read. I'm a bit meh about Edmond/Haylee at the end, but there's something appropriate about the Revenge Twins pairing off to figure out what one does after successfully prosecuting one's revenge. I'm a little worried that in all of Edmond's masterminding, he didn't do any retirement planning: this is absolutely a guy who is going to go nuts in six months because he didn't take some woodworking classes before he retired. (I propose that he get Faria's manuscript published, and then go on a lecture tour, promoting and defending it.)

I'm not quite in the place where I want to start right over at the beginning again, but I do very much miss reading a chapter every day at lunch. And I am curious to know what it looks like on a second read, when one knows what Edmond is about.

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( footnotes )