sophia_sol | here have a WHOLE PILE of book thoughts!

Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen

I listened to it as an audiobook this time and it was a very different experience than reading it directly! It's hard to explain how/why exactly, though. But one of the ways I reacted to listening to it was to become a million times more into the character of Lizzy than previously. I mean, I always liked her? But now I'm like WHY WOULD A READER CRUSH ON DARCY WHEN LIZZY IS RIGHT THERE? I....don't really see why everyone swoons over Darcy. Whereas Lizzy UTTERLY DELIGHTFUL and made of PURE AWESOME. I want very much to be good friends with Lizzy.

When Patty Went to College, by Jean Webster

Great fun! Very much a girl-centred book - set in an all-girls college, aww yeah. The main character, Patty, is irreverent, charming, a troublemaker and prankster, and good-hearted. I really like her, but I think she'd also be rather uncomfortable to have as a friend or acquaintance. I don't know how I feel about the end, where she has that talk with the minister and promises to reform. I don't entirely believe her? And I also don't think that a complete reform is the right answer. Patty is pretty great as she is! She just needs to get better at thinking about the way her actions affect other people.

Just Patty, by Jean Webster

This book was written after When Patty Went to College, and is a prequel, set during Patty's time at boarding school. It's still charmingly written, but it is not nearly so much fun - the worse aspects to Patty's behaviour were given far more leeway both by adult characters and by the narrative, and in general the book just felt far less good-spirited. It felt like the book was of the opinion that Patty is perfect and everything she does is praiseworthy or excusable when um NO. Also there were problematic things like the scene where Patty and her friends dress up raggedly as "gypsies" and tell fortunes. Sigh. Nope.

Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson

For the most part I just really don't know what the heck to say about this book. I mean, I enjoyed it? It was fun! If very dude-focused.

Though I must say it has a weird and abrupt-feeling ending. When I got to the end of the e-book I was convinced there must have been an error in the file and that it was missing several more pages (or chapters!). But nope. That's just how it ends.

The Laughing Cavalier, by Baroness Emma Orczy

I just have SO MANY NOPES for this book! It's a prequel to The Scarlet Pimpernel, being about one of said Scarlet Pimpernel's long-ago ancestors. And it's just. Nope.

Okay so the book involves Gilda, a sweet, innocent young woman; Gilda's brother who is caught up in bad-news political decisions involving plots to murder a dude; the leader of the brother's group of conspirators; and Diogenes, a poor adventurer, who is the titular character and the Pimpernel's ancestor and Gilda's love-interest.

The book involves ENTIRELY too much of Gilda being helpless while the above three dudes do their various plottish things! Everyone agrees lying to Gilda about her brother's involvement in the bad-news politics, in order to preserve her good opinion of her brother, is a good and noble thing! Diogenes, our purported hero, spends a scene early in the book congratulating himself on his strength of will to not assault Gilda! Basically every single male character in the book is a terrible person, and Gilda is powerless to them all. URGH I ship Gilda/getting the hell away from these assholes.

The Wheat Princess, by Jean Webster

This is a romance book that tries to have political opinions and has....mixed success. It's about a young American heiress vacationing Italy during a wheat crisis/famine/general political instability. And it's in large part about her eyes being opened to the parts of the world beyond her privileged sphere, and in that respect it's successful, but.....

Look, here's the thing: the book's conclusion is that because she and her love-interest are Americans, the right thing to do is to abandon Italy to itself, and go home to focus on fixing American problems because devotion to your mother-country is the best thing. This despite the fact that the American love-interest has lived his entire life in Italy and feels far more kinship for Italy than for the US despite his citizenship.

I mean, yes, one person can only participate in activism on so many fronts, and restricting your activities to a particular arena where you can do the most good makes sense, but the overwhelming nationalism in the deciding where to focus your efforts is just so URGH.

Also it doesn't help that the rest of the book contains some URGH on a few other subjects as well.

It's mostly a good and interesting and well-meaning book! It's just...not always good at accomplishing what it's trying to do.

Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell

CRANFORD IS AMAZINGGGGG and I am so utterly delighted. Zero plot, very few dudes, nothing but women being themselves and being supportive of each other and being friends with each other. A+++, would read again.

(in slightly more detail: it is the story of the village of Cranford, told by a lady who is not a Cranford resident but comes fairly regularly to visit her friends there. Cranford is inhabited by an unusually large number of older single ladies of limited means, and the book is the story of how these ladies relate to one another and to the rest of the town. And I hugged the book to myself multiple times in an excess of feelings about ~LADY FRIENDSHIP~)

I am very sad that when I go to ao3, all of the Cranford fic there is based on a tv adaptation, even when it is labeled "Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell" which SHOULD be the disambiguation for the BOOK but no. Also, inexplicably, none of the fics are about Miss Matty. (MISS MATTY!!!!) And ALL of the extant fics look to be either stories about men or stories about het relationships. I AM DISAPPOINT, FANDOM :((( Of all things this should be a fandom of femslash and lady-centric gen and I just genuinely have no clue how a person could want anything else from Cranford. I mean MAYBE I could see myself to caring about a fic about Miss Matty and her thwarted love story from her younger days but other than that.....?

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Ozma of Oz, and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, all by L. Frank Baum

I have complicated opinions on the Oz books. Like, they're charming, mostly? But also very very episodic and with constant new introductions of characters and basically an oz book rarely actually feels coherent as a book. But they're still somehow charming, and very very nostalgic.

EXCEPT I can't help but notice and be horrified by the casual way various speaking, sentient beings are talked and thought about as pets or property. Why is the Sawhorse a working animal and Ozma's property, whereas Jack Pumpkinhead is his own person? Why is Eureka the kitten Dorothy's pet, and Tik-Tok Dorothy's property? And so on and so forth. It's creepy. And the fact that I started reading Uncle Tom's Cabin (an anti-slavery novel) directly after reading several Oz books only makes the treatment of these talking beings feel even more creepy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm only 2 eps into the TV series of Cranford, but it is excellent, fwiw. Not that I don't fully understand your frustration with the skew of the fanfic.

one of the things about the tv show that frustrates me is that when I look at the wiki page it looks like it has far more interest in male characters than the book does. The book has a few male characters but they are by far secondary characters and women and their relationships with each other are the important things. Whereas the tv show (from what wiki seems to show me) is a little more even-handed in its quantities and focus on male vs female characters.

Though since you've actually seen some of it - is this true? What do you think about how much focus there is on male vs female characters in the show?

I think you're right. It feels female-centric to me but I suspect that's only because I'm so used to everything being all about the men: it's probably more like 50-50. They spend a lot of time on the young doctor. /based on the first 2 eps only

Yeah, that's kind of what I thought.

And whoa, what, the doctor is getting that much focus? really? coming from the book that....feels really weird. (but then I would say that about ANY of the male characters getting focus)

I guess they thought that as an outsider, he was a useful POV character? Idk.

here have a WHOLE PILE of book thoughts!

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