Books

The Big Read list…a journey through books

I am a lover of booklists, and here is one from Ms. Place on Jane Austen’s World Blog (taken partially from the Big Read on the BBC,  and several other blogs)…  I repeat this here and send it out to you all…a great list, so follow the instructions and see where you have been and where you might go on your reading journey….

(though I do have to add that this is not a list of the 100 BEST books by any means…it seems an interesting compilation of classics and a number of contemporary titles that are not perhaps the best literature, but good reads…there are also some very obvious errors and omissions…, but one cannot quibble with any such list…it is always subjective and bears the bias of the listmaker….but a great place to start in case you need a push.  I also find it hard to believe that the average adult has only read SIX of these titles?  Yikes!   So I append the list with none of my markings as yet…I will post my results in a comment.  So let’s hear from you and what your reading score might be….

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.”

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (a good many of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Books · News

Jane Austen’s Regency World Magazine

Beginning August 1, “Jane Austen’s Regency World Magazine,”  published by the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, will offer a subscription discount of twenty percent to members of the Jane Austen Society of North America. The offer is not yet “live,” but you can read about it on this preview page: http://www.janeausten.co.uk/regencyworld/page.ihtml?id=12

JASNA has a 2-page article in each issue of the magazine, and favorites Maggie Lane and Sheryl Craig are also regular contributors.  The contents of the current and all back issues can be viewed online with one sample article downloadable from each issue.

Also see Laurel Ann’s post on Jane Austen Today about the latest July Newsletter from the Jane Austen Center.  You can sign up for this online newsletter at the Center’s website….and be sure to take the     “Pride & Prejudice” Quiz …[you might just find you need to re-read the book, a perfect thought for a summer’s day!]

Books · Query

A Jane Fairfax Conundrum

Over the weekend I read Penny Gay’s thought-provoking Persuasions article: “Jane Fairfax and the ‘She Tragedies’ of the Eighteenth Century.” But I am curious as to where a statement (not footnoted) comes from; can anyone out there help ???

Dr Gay makes a wonderful case for Jane Fairfax to be compared with the type of characters portrayed so well onstage by Sarah Siddons; these characters usually went mad, killed themselves, or simply died. To sustain the proposed connection page 128 has the following parenthetical claim: Austen, of course, knew well where Jane [Fairfax] really belonged as a character: she told her family that Jane did not long survive her marriage to Frank [Churchill].

Told her family made me conclude that A Memoir of Jane Austen was the source; but that cannot be, for here are all the statements regarding the ‘future’ of Austen’s characters in the 1871 edition:

“She [Jane Austen] certainly took a kind of parental interest in the beings whom she had created, and did not dismiss them from her thoughts when she had finished her last chapter. … She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of some of her people. In this traditionary way we learned that Miss Steele never succeeded in catching the Doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Philip’s clerks, and was content to be considered a star in the socitey of Meriton; that the ‘considerable sum’ given by Mrs. Norris to William Price was one pound; that Mr. Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr. Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon.’ Of the good people in ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’ we know nothing more than what is written…” (pp. 148-9)

Did Dr Gay mix up Mr Woodhouse’s demise with the Frank-Jane ‘pardon’?? Or does a more extensive list of what happened to Jane Austen’s characters after the book(s) ended exist elsewhere??

I do have Le Faye’s Reminiscences of Caroline Austen to check, but see nothing there in a cursory look; I do not own Caroline’s My Aunt Jane Austen, but have searched through MA Austen-Leigh’s Personal Aspects of Jane Austen and find no mention of ‘fairfax’ or ‘churchill’ – so I throw open the question for discussion:

Did Jane Fairfax, according to Jane Austen, not long survive her marriage??

Books · News

Reading List 101: the Chawton House Library Reading Group

Happily found in my mailbox:   The Female Spectator, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring 2008, publication of the Chawton House Library.  This issue has a terrific a list of books that the Library Reading Group has chosen for its 2008-9 discussions of the work of women writers, 1600-1830.  For those of us always looking for other titles to read after our annual re-reads of Austen, this is a wonderful place to start (and only sorry I cannot attend the monthly meetings at the Library which include afternoon tea!)…here is the schedule of reads:

  • Fielding, Sarah. THE ADVENTURES OF DAVID SIMPLE.  (Sept)
  • Burney, Frances.  THE WANDERER.  (Oct)
  • Wordsworth, Dorothy.  THE GRASMERE AND ALFOXDEN JOURNALS.  (Nov)
  • Austen, Jane.  PERSUASION.  (Dec)
  • Wollstonecraft, Mary.  MARY.  (Jan)
  • Robinson, Mary.  BEAUX AND BELLES OF ENGLAND.  (Feb)
  • Falconbridge, Anna Maria.  NARRATIVE OF TWO VOYAGES TO SIERRA LEONE.  (Mar)
  • Radcliffe, Ann.  THE ITALIAN.  (April)
  • Shelley, Mary.  THE LAST MAN.  (May)
   
              
 

  
Books · JASNA-Vermont events · Uncategorized

On Re-Reading “Northanger Abbey”

An updated version of this blog post can be found here:

https://janeausteninvermont.blog/2017/12/15/pump-rooms-and-gothic-terrors-how-northanger-abbey-came-to-be/

 

 

Books · News

A Signed “Emma” on the block…

I append the following story from BBC News:   

“From BBC News:  Record price for inscribed Austen

An inscribed first edition of Jane Austen’s novel Emma has fetched a record £180,000 at a London auction.  The three-volume set inscribed on behalf of Austen to Anne Sharp, her friend and governess to her niece, was sold at Bonhams to a telephone bidder.  Of 12 presentation copies sent by Austen’s publisher, it was the only one given to a friend of the author. The book, first published in 1816, tells the story of Emma Woodhouse and her matchmaking exploits.  The price was a new world record auction price for a printed book by Austen. 

 

The British vendor, who wants to remain anonymous, is descended from a family that married into the family of Richard Withers, who was left property belonging to Ms Sharp when she died. They said: “The family are delighted with the price fetched today. The novel had been sitting in my family library for at least three generations.”

  

‘Slightly spoiled’

Austen gave nine presentation copies of Emma to family, one to the library of the Prince Regent and one to a countess. Ms Sharp’s was the only one given to a personal friend – a demonstration of the bond between the two women.  They became friends while Ms Sharp was working as governess to the author’s brother Edward, and remained close for many years.  For the novel, Austen created a governess character called Miss Taylor.  Set in Regency England, the novel’s heroine, a young woman aged 21, is described in the opening paragraph as “handsome, clever and rich”, but also “slightly spoiled”.

 

In March, Bonhams sold a rare, inscribed first edition of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit for a world record-breaking £60,000.  And in November last year, it sold a first edition of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights for £114,000. “

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk:80/2/hi/uk_news/7470543.stm
 

See also:  Laurel Ann’s wonderful post on Jane Austen’s Dearest Friendship on “Austenprose” for more information and a list of resources about Austen’s friendship with Anne Sharp.

Books

His Cunning or Hers: A Postscript to PERSUASION

Checking out the JASNA website (www.jasna.org) I was treated to the delightful online edition of “His Cunning or Hers“, an AGM Publication (Lake Louise, Alberta; 1993) by June Menzies, with illustrations by Juliet McMaster. Brew a cup of tea, and settle in…

Book reviews · Books

Book Review: Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma

I am no lover of sequels. I just shut down really, when, in anticipation of a beloved author’s continued words on a character or plot or unfolding event, I run smack into a wall of some stranger’s thoughts.  I want JANE AUSTEN’s words, I want new works from her, something more to read, to savor, not a return to or a rehashing of any of the nearly perfect worlds of her six novels.  Those are complete to me, and I want them left alone, I want to protect her characters from someone else’s mutterings.  So I confess to not reading any of the many sequels and much prefer to just re-read Austen, who says most everything better than anyone. [After writing this, I was looking at Joan Klingel Ray’s Jane Austen for Dummies and find her words on pg 297, almost mine exactly…”  I have to admit that when I need more Jane Austen, I just reread Jane Austen….I am not a fan of sequels…and I would never attempt to convince [others] not to read the sequels…but I am content to let Austen’s characters’ lives end with her novels…” (p297)  So I am in good company I think!  ]… Continue reading “Book Review: Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma”

Books

Rejecting Jane

Finally got around to reading the article by David Lassman entitled REJECTING JANE (published in Jane Austen’s Regency World; issue 28, July-August 2007). An experiment whereby chapters of actual Jane Austen novels were sent to publishers and agents! As an aspiring writer myself, what could be more daunting than to read of these rejections – for rejections are what came back.

For each query (18 in total), four publishers and two agents were sent sample chapters from one of three Austen novels: Northanger Abbey – very apropos to our June 22nd meeting; Persuasion; and Pride and Prejudice. The novels were all submitted by a Miss Alison Laydee, a resident of Bath, with their titles changed (ditto lead character names) to, respectively, Susan, The Watsons, and First Impressions. Gotta laugh when the “First Impressions” packets went out unchanged as to the first line of the opening paragraph… and still no one caught on – with one possible exception (though this person may have been more fixated upon the opening pages).

Responses to these queries (15 out of 18 received at the time of publication) were nail-bitingly quick, though with the usual result: thanks, but no thanks. I would quibble, however, as to why packets were mailed to publishers NOT accepting unsolicited manuscripts, or to the agent who dealt only with TV and film writers; these circumstances surely were known by the submitter – or should have been better researched.

No need to condense the story; read it yourself at Regency World. And ‘thanks, David’ for the best laugh I’ve had this week!

Books

Online Jane Austen “find”

Some of the most difficult books to track down are those published privately by Austen-Leigh family members. These include a lot of publications from Spottiswoode (for background on the firm, see this book). Others are simply seminal Austen offerings. Tonight’s “find” is from Internet Archive: CHAWTON MANOR AND ITS OWNERS. This is one of those books referenced in footnotes, but which you might never otherwise actually see. CHECK IT OUT!!

Today, the Manor is known as Chawton House Library (see the links page for their website); the graves of Cassandra and Mrs Austen are found to the side of St. Nicholas’ Church, just a bit further down the quiet lane that passes the manor house. The photographs in this book may be the only views of the house most of us see; I was in Chawton on a day which was not a Thursday, alas that the only day it was open to the public. (Chawton House Library had also been my work venue of choice, had I gotten JASNA’s IVP nod.) And, written by family, this is a prime source for information about the KNIGHTS who adopted Jane’s brother Edward. The book also includes portraits of Edward which I’ve never seen elsewhere (though the one of his wife Elizabeth is extremely familiar).

A couple other books found at the same site: Personal Aspects of Jane Austen was written by Edward and Emma Austen-Leigh’s daughter, Mary Augusta. Not as ‘valuable’ a book, in my opinion, as her father’s Memoir of Jane Austen, never mind Mary’s own memoir of her father, James-Edward Austen-Leigh, it might find some interest among our Janeites (though not so, according to the handwritten note across the title page!). This other book looks interesting, but I’ve not yet had the chance to read much of it; so tell me whether YOU think it an overlooked early biography, terribly dated, or could never have been very good… It’s from 1920 and is divided into some thought-provoking sections: The Novelist; The Realist; The Woman.

And if it weren’t so late (at the tone the time will be three a.m. BONG!), I’d read a Jane Austen’s Regency World article on Miss Austen Regrets or their article on Rejecting Jane (how she might have fared in today’s publishing world); but that has to wait ’til “morning”… So long, farewell, au revoir, auf wiedersehen.