Evelina by Fanny Burney

"If you like Jane Austen, you'll like Evelina," my 18th-century Brit lit professor promised us before we began reading this book. I'd never heard of it, but I do like Austen, so I was interested to see if my professor was right. 

So, was he? Am I going to send all you Janeites running out to the bookstore to buy Evelina?

In a way, it was a lot like Jane Austen. Like I said, it's a story about a young woman coming out into society. Plus, it has other Austen-esque features, such as: romance, class issues (and sometimes, class issues IN romance--that's a bonus), marriage, annoying people who won't shut up, gender issues, propriety problems, and probably lots more.

But believe it or not, with all those similarities, this book really didn't feel much like Austen to me. It was somewhat darker. Unlike with Austen novels, the characters didn't spend all their time in the drawing-rooms of the gentry. The "improper" people weren't just snooty Catherine de Bourghs inviting young ladies to play their pianofortes; they were often genuinely cruel, rude, creepy, or just downright gross (or all of the above). Just a few of the events that would never show up in an Austen novel:

My Bookshelves

This week, Modern Mrs. Darcy is hosting a fun link-up: What's on your bookshelf?

My bookshelves are a bit pathetic. I don't really buy a lot of books due to my starving-student status. So these are just the beginnings of my book collection.

I only have one bookcase in my apartment that I actually put books on, and that's this monster bookcase built into the wall in our bedroom. It's tucked discreetly between our closet and the bedroom door. I fell in love with it when we moved in--we didn't have much shelf space in our old apartment.

These books are general fiction. (Though I can see a couple on there that deserve a place with the classics. Oops.) There's my husband's battered copy of October Sky, which we read together this year, and my beloved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

This is my British literature shelf (plus Moby Dick, War and Peace, and Little Women, because I didn't want to break up the pretty editions). There's my lovely Jane Austen collection; the red velvety one is the copy of The Secret Garden that I read as a kid; and the brown one on top is Bleak House, which I read recently. And the MLA Handbook, for some reason.

Pamela by Samuel Richardson (Vlog!)

I'm going out on a limb today and I tried video blogging for the first time ever!

Please cut me some slack on this video since, like I said, it's my first "vlog" ever. My lovely backdrop is my untidy kitchen and pantry...I swear it was the best lighting I could find in my apartment. And I do get a bit rambly at the end. So please try to ignore my mistakes. It was a fun experience overall and I do hope to do more video reviews in the future. Let me know what you think of it!

(Also, I look really young--I promise I'm not fifteen years old. :) )

P.S. Here's a blog post on my other blog about my video blogging experience, what I learned, and why you should try it, too!

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

I've been meaning to write this post for quite some time now. Since Oedipus Rex (or Oedipus the King) is on my Classics Club list, I feel like it's only right to write about it.

But it's just...so...not something I want to write about.

If you read my post about ancient literature, you know that I was less than thrilled with this and various other works that represent the grand ol' ancient world. Now, usually I prefer the literature of a time/place to just about anything else it has produced. But that certainly isn't the case with the Greeks and Oedipus Rex.

I gave everything I had to like this play. I read it and discussed it with my class, and I went and saw a live stage version of it. But nothing could make me enjoy it. In fact, it was hard to appreciate it on any level.

Maybe it's just that Sophocles and I simply don't have a connection. Maybe I'm just not old enough to appreciate it. Maybe I'll read it again in twenty years and then love it. I certainly hope so.

But for now, this pretty much sums up my reaction to Oedipus Rex: All these things happen that are supposed to be exciting, but I'm just bored and grossed out.

Now that I think about it, that's actually a pretty amazing feat. If that's what Sophocles was trying to accomplish, then I applaud him.

Does anyone out there have words of wisdom that can convert me to this work of genius?

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

This book was quietly wonderful. It wasn't one of those books you have no choice to love, that grab onto you and force you to love them, like Les Miserables or Wuthering Heights or Little Women. No; this was a book that quietly took its place in the corner, folded its hands, and just sat.

What struck me about this book was that there was virtually no significant plot. Sure, there were events, but the events mainly served to expose the character, Holly Golightly. Holly Golightly was the only thing that mattered in this story. Even the narrator was there only as our eyes, to enable us to see her, as a person profoundly interested in her.

Holly is not the everyman that novels are famous for, the main character that everyone can relate to. She's much better than that; she's completely unique. She's an enigma, a celebrity, a personality circus freak. She's wild. She's amoral. She's out of the bounds of anything society tries to impose on her.

First Blogiversary

It occurred to me the other day that it's been a year since I started this blog. A year. It hardly feels like it's been that long.

I'm still learning a lot about book blogging. In some ways, I feel just as naive and ignorant as when I first started on October 26, 2012. My blog is still just beginning.

But in other ways, I feel that if nothing else, the past year has been about integrating myself into this fascinating community of book lovers who take time out of their busy lives to share the book love online with strangers across the globe. It took me a while to get the hang of things and find blogs I wanted to read, and to feel like anyone at all was reading mine. But now I feel proud to say that I am a real, live book blogger. It may not always be easy to fit another hobby into my school schedule, but I'm passionate about book blogging. I think I have even more ideas and excitement for blogging than I had a year ago.

Many thanks to those who have kept coming to my book blog over the past year. It's wonderful to have my few wonderful friends who keep faithfully reading, and who write wonderful blogs themselves! I'm also so grateful to those who have just come once or twice. I love writing this blog and I hope some of you enjoy reading it, too.

I know this post is a little mushy and cliche, but I couldn't let my one-year anniversary go by without mentioning it! Hope you're all enjoying my little corner of the blogosphere, and I hope to be blogging for many more years to come!

Ancient Literature

I'm taking a world literature class. The first half of world literature, aka Ancient Literature. (Yes, the caps are necessary.)

I was going to try to post separately about the various works of literature I'm reading, like the Epic of Gilgamesh and Oedipus the King. Lovely stories. Only made more agreeable by the ripping off of limbs and gouging out of eyes. But truth be told, I have very little to say about these stories. In a classroom setting? I could go on for fifteen minutes about the significance of the text in a historical context and what it says about the culture and time period in which it was written. But honestly? I have no emotional connection to these texts.

Now, an emotional connection isn't really necessary in order to write a paper about it, but to say anything about a book here on the blog would be positively dull if I didn't have some sort of feeling attached to it. Love, hate, anger, whatever. Even just a vague enjoyment.

I was excited to take this class because I thought I would get to learn about mysterious other cultures and their secrets to the universe. Needless to say, this was quite naive. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Oedipus the King, and the Aeneid don't seem to have too many secrets to the universe. (Unless they go something like, "No matter what you do, the gods are going to run your life, so get over it.")