Pride and Prejudice - The Wedding Planner - posted 6 months ago

OK - I am on this insane Jane Austen kick, which stared about a month ago when I saw the Masterpiece theater Pride and Prejudice. then I read it, then I read Sense and Sensibility, then Persuasion, Now Emma. There is a pleasure in the way these women speak for themselves and negotiate a place for themselves in the context of the society they travel in. You bet these stories always end in marriage, it's a convention of the romance, but the heroines are extremely independent and it seems a victory that they find a worthy mate and a happy marriage, and they hold on to their integrity despite silly parents, impending poverty and social pressure.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - People I want to meet when I die - posted 6 months ago

In so many ways Dostoevsky is unparalled, and deserves a new reading every decade. I listed to the unabridged Brothers on books on tape not long ago and found it more current than ever. In high school my favorite was the Idiot. American lit of the 19th Century was radical in in its own right and anyone who reads Moby Dick is in for a Treat (- I'll take that -or the Scarlet letter- over War and Peace for questioning the natural law vs organized religion). Too many issues arise in the 20th century to generalize, but for me, Chekhov was the father of the short story and you could draw a direct line from Chekhov to Joyce to Grace Paley and Alice Munro.