Sunday, October 27, 2024

ONWARD YOU ZOMBIES!

If any of you have been paying attention, you may have noticed that I began awhile back posting cover pictures of the latest book I've read.

It's over in the right margin of this page.

If you've been keeping track, you've seen that my interests are all over the block.

In other words, fiction to non-fiction and subjects widely disparate.

My latest addition is new today as I finally completed reading "Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen.




Perhaps an unusual choice for a 21st century man to read because it's an extremely wordy romance novel first published over 200 years ago.

But I kept hearing, throughout my long life, about Austen and one day when I was browsing in our public library I spotted several of her books on a shelf.

So I brought one home, determined to see what all the praise was about.

Now, granted, she was a very good writer and, as I remarked to Judy, she had mastered a fine art of any good suspense novelist of this or any century: the cliff-hanger.

Leaving just enough at the end of each chapter to make the reader want to know what was going to happen in the next and keep him or her reading.

But after 50 chapters and 452 pages of very fine print, I think I've read enough Jane Austen to last this curious guy all the years he has left.

Now to change subjects violently, need I remind you that there are only a few days left before the darkest of holidays, All Hallows Eve?

More commonly known these days as Halloween.

If warnings ARE needed, then here is some help from the Comedy Bank/Banque.


11 comments:

  1. Oh, dear! No Jane Austin for me!

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  2. I've always liked wordy perhaps because I tend that way myself. :)

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  3. I have never read anything by Jane Austen. I found Nathaniel Hawthorne to be excessively wordy, and abandoned The House of the Seven Gables in the first chapter. I couldn't do that with The Scarlet Letter, it being an assigned book for my high school English class. A valedictorian's gotta do what a valedictorian's gotta do.

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  4. I've listened to some of her works on audible books. I liked Emma. My eyes get too tired to read fiction.

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  5. Love the cartoon. I haven't read any Jane Austen and don't plan to. Anything that takes too many words to tell a story is a no-no here. Life is too short and there are too many books waiting to be plowing through long-windedness.

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  6. Have you read Celeste Ng's book, "Our Missing Hearts"? It was recommended on another blog and I couldn't put it down. I usually read mysteries and so this was very different for me but it was well written and the story was timely.

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  7. Many years ago, I tried listening to and audio book of a Jane Austen work on a long road trip. The only time I ever tossed CD's out of the car window as I drove down the expressway.

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  8. I have to agree about Austen. Too wordy for me... this from someone who has read War & Peace 3 times. And frankly, all the hyperdrama over who is going to marry who just wears me down. Thanking the gods to have been born in a time when my welfare did not depend on who I married!

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  9. I love Jane Austin because her books help put me to sleep during those nights I'm experiencing insomnia. Nothing like wordy descriptions going practically nowhere to lull one to sleep.

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