Pride and Prejudice

Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Haruki Murakami, Jose Saramago. All popular authors and Back-Blogged mainstays for sure, but lately I felt like I have been focusing a bit too much on those guys and need to branch out with my book-logging. To my surprise, I actually have only posted books by those four authors since mid-February of last year. That's terrible! I still have loads more King books to read, a novel and a short story by Saramago, and one novel by Murakami; I likely won't post any more GRRM until The Winds of Winter comes out, whenever that is. But still though, I need to break from tradition and try something a little out of my wheelhouse. For this reason I've been browsing guterberg.org and Amazon, adding plenty of free books to my backlog, and I intend to add many more. Some are children's classics, some are lengthy beasts, but they're in my backlog and I intend to read them all and provide my poorly articulated views. First up, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Pride and Prejudice is a window into a society that doesn't really exist anymore, at least not in the same form, the rich British landed gentry. The closest I've come to experiencing entertainment concerning this class of society is the not-so-good Downton Abbey, which focuses on the end of its era; in Pride and Prejudice this social class is alive and well, and it comes with its own set of rules for how to generally live your life. And if you were a woman, even being rich wasn't a very pleasant experience. I knew the gist of the plot here- a young woman trying to find love and feeling pressure from her family to marry eventually falls for a guy who's kind of a dick; but I didn't know the reason why there was so much pressure for her to marry in the first place. Apparently a system called 'entailment' existed as a form of inheritance. Our protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, is the second of five daughters in the Bennet clan, and she has no brothers. As such, once her father dies, their lavish property will immediately belong to his nearest male heir, a distant cousin. So rather than let her daughters potentially face homelessness, Elizabeth's mother makes it her goal to marry off all of her daughters to rich men as soon as possible, which makes up the bulk of the story- different suitors show up to the Bennet's estate and they all seem to have their faults and strengths, and it's a mess trying to figure out who cares for whom and who will irreparably cut ties with whom based on arrogance and misinformation- "Pride" and "Prejudice" if you will. I was surprised at how easy a read this was- I was ready for some dense, boring prose, and there was a little bit of that here, but I can see why Jane Austen is still widely beloved today. Her satire shines through in some memorable caricatures of the stuffy aristocracy, like the suck-up idiot Mr. Collins or the overly demanding Lady Catherine. So yeah, so far a good start reaching back to the classics. I'll probably post one or two more before the year is out. If anything, this will keep me from making 10 Stephen King posts in a row next year.