The Saturday Morning Post (No. 120)

 

One last chance...

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen  DNF  14%

Sadly, nope. I believe I read this book before, so I had expected to like, though not love this book. But it wasn't to be. 

Clearly, I'm not sophisticated enough to understand, appreciate, and enjoy the wit, charm, and social commentary of Miss Austen. She is just too subtle for me, at least by this point in her career. I missed the wit of Northanger Abbey, and the story of Mansfield Park. I found nothing amusing in the first 14% of this book I read. There was very little dialog, all of which I found hard to follow. No doubt my fault. I was reading it, not studying it. There was hardly any story in what I read as well. The setting was as sparse as a high school stage play. The famous characters, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, also came off like high school student actors; serviceable, at best, for her purposes. I found nothing memorable or remarkable about any of of the characters, at least in a pleasing way. Clearly I was missing something. Maybe the charm of this story is develops over the rest of the book. In any event, realizing that I wasn't enjoying it, and that I didn't give a damn about any of the characters, I regretfully, said, "Nope." 

It may be a weakness of mine that I want to spend my time in the company of pleasant people, both real and fictional. I didn't find any pleasant people in the part of the novel I read, no one I cared to spend my time with. And since I'd been introduced to the main characters of the story, I had no hope of finding any by reading further. Though, I will say this, she writes boring and annoying people quite well. It is one of her strong suits. It's the engaging and interesting ones that I find she has trouble portraying with an verve or authenticity. In my opinion.

I also am notorious for wanting to be drawn into a story, not just told it, coldly from afar; which is Austen's style. Plus, as I said above, I found little, indeed, no evidence of her wit to brighten the tedious tale she was telling. In my opinion.

"In my opinion," is, of course, the key to this, and all my reviews. But that is how I review books. I make no sweeping judgements on books, beyond how they strike me in light of my stated preferences. (See above) Pride and Prejudice has stood the test of time, and is hailed as a classic, beloved by many, and I give them the joy of it. Having just read two of her books and tried two more, I can only say that Miss Austen's work is simply not for me. I'll take a Georgette Heyer any day. Her characters are fairly predictable, but at least they live and breath, converse with some wit and, you know, actually do stuff. 

On the other hand, just this week I picked up a modern historical romance from the library; one with a rom-com vibe since I like lighthearted stories. I only got half a dozen pages into it before I decided it wasn't for me. No real historical flavor, cringy characters, modern writing. I won't be reviewing it, as I couldn't get far enough into it to say more than; clearly I'm not its target audience. In light of this experience, Heyer seems to be a good compromise for these social history stories; approachable, well written stories, if a bit predictable even if they may lack Austen's depths.