I never realised how many books I actually read, but because I read quite sporadically, I've always wanted to join a bookclub so that I could get into a more regular rhythm, and also because it's no fun reading a book and then realising you have no one to talk about it to.
Unfortunately, most book clubs meet pretty regularly, and being a busy uni student, I never did join a book club. But earlier this year, Michael and I started a book club where we meet every two months to discuss the book that we previously set! It's pretty fun and it's opened me up to reading books that I wouldn't usually.
It's good too because we pick books around the 400-500 page mark, so if you like reading a lot you can still read other books, and if you are trying to get into reading, these books aren't intimidatingly long.
We've set three books so far, and I'll probably blog about them soon, but for now, I need to geek out a bit about Jane Austen.
I absolutely love Pride and Prejudice, I've read it twice already and it's tied as my favourite book (alongside A Storm of Swords). I've also read Sense and Sensibility, and in between book club reads, I also managed to read Mansfield Park (my review is below). Michael bought me a tome of a book compiling all seven of Austen's novels, and I'm slowly but surely reading through them.
I love the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, and I really want to get into the 1995 BBC series adaptation, but in the meantime I discovered an amazing YouTube adaptation of the novel!
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is done in a vlog style where Lizzie Bennet is now a college grad student who decides to do a vlog series as part of her thesis. Most of the vlogs are just done with her sitting in her bedroom in front of the camera, so most of it is just recounting notable events that happened in her life, although we do get to meet some of the other characters from the novel.
I honestly recommend anyone who has read or seen a version of Pride and Prejudice to watch this! If you haven't read it yet, then you should read it before you watch the series, but if you are not planning on reading it ever, it's still a really great series to watch. It only has 100 episodes, each being about 5 minutes long, so it won't take up too much of your time.
I found the casting of each character to be perfect, and it's such a groundbreaking way to do a modern adaptaion of the novel! The way they adapt Austenian marriage proposals and marriage scandals to something equally as exciting or intrigueing in the modern day is ingenious. Even adapting some of the ridiculous names to modern versions is great, and that has even allowed for some Asian actors to join the cast, which is fantastic! And yes, the change from Charles Bingley to Bing Lee almost makes me chuckle.
They also have spin-off videos, they've made Twitter and Facebook accounts for the characters, and they have even published a book with secret diary entries of Lizzie Bennet. I'm not too sure if I'm interested in buying that, because I have so many books on my to-read list, but it's definitely cool how they made it almost like Pride and Prejudice really could take place in real life.
They have also done an Emma Approved series, an adaptation of another popular Austen novel, Emma (which was also the source material for the 1995 film Clueless), and I'm keen to watch that after I read the novel, which is next up in the book since I finished Mansfield Park.
Chloe's thoughts: Really liked it (4/5)
The Price family struggles financially (despite their name), and as a result, Fanny, the eldest daughter, is taken in to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle, the Lady Bertram and Sir Thomas. There, she grows up with her four cousins and the novel details her upbringing in this family.
Mansfield Park is often stated to be the least liked Austen novel, and I can definitely understand why people would say that.
In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet, though not without her faults, is tomboyish, headstrong and norm-defying. Here, the protagonist is the complete opposite. She doesn't quite belong to this new family as she's not treated an equal to her cousins, and as a result she's often neglected and quite passive. She's very obedient though, and has been educated very well on how to be a proper lady, so all of this combined just means that she becomes a pushover. Because of that, many people don't like this novel.
I must admit, that is definitely an issue with this story, since it's really hard to love someone who is so perfectly a lady and yet so completely helpless at the same time.
But the fault isn't there, the fault is that in the end, she is completely the same person as she was at the start of the novel. She's still a pushover and she has almost no character arc. That's my one gripe about this novel. Up until the very last chapter, I actually thought that she had changed for the better, but Austen managed to pull out a really bizarre ending that did not sit well with me.
Apart from that though, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It starts off a bit slow, but a few chapters in it starts getting really funny and exciting. It's amazing how so much plot can progress in Austen novels, which have a setting where almost nothing ever happens in the dull and boring lives of women in the 1800s.
We meet interesting characters such as the Bertram family, each of them quite different from the other, with the girls Julia and Maria also looking for love. I must admit, this side plot of the Bertram girls trying to each seduce the charming Henry Crawford is probably more interesting than Fanny's own story. There's also a huge huge HUGE scandal towards the end of the novel which was quite a massive shocker, and just made everything so much more exciting.
Another fun thing about this novel is, just like how most of the humour in Pride and Prejudice comes from Mrs. Bennet, most of the humour in Mansfield Park comes from Mrs. Norris (queen of gossip, contradictions, and annoyances) and the Lady Bertram (the embodiment of a trophy wife, marrying rich and having a life of idling by). Actually, all the females save Fanny are pretty funny here.
So in the end, the overall novel is great. It has flaws in how the characters are and how the end resolves itself (she ended up marrying the guy that I didn't want her to marry), and it's very controversial because of Fanny's annoying morality (I don't think she does a single thing wrong in this novel), which makes her a very hard protagonist to relate with. But it's still very enjoyable, it has some very interesting plot devices, and it's quite humourous, in that lovely Austen-satire sort of way.
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