Louise's Challenge

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Great Job!

[Nicolle]

That title is a mouthful!

[Louise]

Yes. But it's wonderful. Really really enjoying this series (starts with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making which I read last year). It's got a lot of the Alice in Wonderland about it but with more of an actual plot.

[Nicolle]

I really want to read this series now.

[Louise]

You totally should. It's great.

[Louise]

Back (sorry about disappearance pretty crappy couple of months). Not read any more from the master list yet, but read and reviewed about 4 from my own personal list.

[Nicolle]

Oh I hope you're ok now. :)

[Louise]

Yeah, I'm doing alright at the moment, thanks :)

[Nicolle]

Good :D
Joining our group read next month?

[Louise]

Oooh, good question! It's one I've already read, but I have been meaning to reread 1984 for years...

I think I'll have to wait and see how I feel in August. Big fan of just picking up whatever I'm in the mood for, but might give it another go if I feel I'm up to something that heavy going.

[Louise]

And finished and reviewed The Island of Doctor Moreau - again not one on the original list, but one from mine that I've been meaning to read for a long time. My first H.G. Wells and I really enjoyed it.

[Bev]

Louise wrote: "And finished and reviewed The Island of Doctor Moreau - again not one on the original list, but one from mine that I've been meaning to read for a long time. My first H.G. Wells and I really enjoye..."

Ooh I read that years and years ago and I have an old tatty copy somewhere in a box in the garage. I really must unpack some of my boxes methinks.

[Louise]

That's what garages are for though - storing all the books you don't have any space for in the house.

Finished and reviewed Lady Susan by Jane Austen (personal list again). Really enjoyed it despite the crappy ending.

[Nicolle]

Never heard of that Austen. Can I ask why the ending was bad or will it be a spoiler?

[Louise]

It's a short story she wrote when she was in her teens (I think) before any of her novels and was published posthumously along with her other early writing. Am trying to remember why the ending was so bad (apart from Lady Susan getting her comeuppance), had to check my review and it's all come flooding back:

'the epistolary form is also the story’s undoing. In the end the narrator has to abruptly apologise that the story could not reasonably be told through letters anymore (just as it looked like it might be getting tense for Frederica too) before shifting into a very short and clumsy third-person account to tie up all the lose ends. It’s a really, really, unsatisfactory way of concluding it and it feels like Austen had written herself into a corner and then decided just to give up and move onto something else. But I liked the main body of the story'

Basically it was just never really finished properly. Which isn't really surprising given it was never published or really intended to be in her lifetime

[Martha]

She was very young when she wrote it. I'm glad I read it, but haven't read any others if her early works. Have you? It would be interesting to read them chronologically to see improvement in style along the way.

[Louise]

The book I read was a (selected) collection of her Juvenilia, plus the first chapters of her unfinished novels Sanditon and the Watsons.

I'm glad I read it all, I do love a bit of Austen and it is really neat to see her progression as a writer and the way she went from parodying the silly tropes common in romantic novels (some of her really early stuff is kinda nuts) to the more subtle humour and social criticism of her published novels.

Lady Susan is still probably the only one I'd recommend to most casual readers if they wanted to try early Austen. The rest of the stuff I read was only really interesting because, as you say, of the way you can see her writing develop - they're not necessarily the best stories when taken in isolation on their own merit.

Think I give Lady Susan a 4 star rating here, but my review for the book as a whole was 3 stars.