Reading in order

I haven't purchased a book in over a month. I know that doesn't sound like that long...but trust me, it is. When going over my credit card statements for the accountant, I was pretty shocked to see how often I consoled myself with a visit or twelve to Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com. Needless to say, I cannot afford to be doing that in the future. Plus, most of the time, it wasn't even like I was reading the book immediately when I got home. Usually I bought it just so I would have it when I finally had time to sit down and read, which is not very often these days.

So now I'm relying fairly heavily on borrowed books from friends and library books. The strange part about this is that now my reading is scheduled by date, which hasn't happened pretty much since college. But depending on when the library (or the friend) needs the book back, I have to fit reading into my schedule or return the book without having read it, which always frustrates me. Normally, I'm the type who likes to have a stack of books waiting to be read and pick and choose among them according to my mood. Not so much any more (though I'm looking forward to RT next month--they give away free books there!)

In the last couple of weeks, I've read Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin (seriously, that's actually the name of the book even though that's the title of every parody of a biography) and I just finished Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld last night.

The Jane Austen book was interesting--and don't worry I won't go on too long about it because then people will start to tease me, again, about my obssession--because it revealed a few things I never knew about her or that I probably once knew and had forgotten.

First, not that this is a great shocker, but life back then was not quite as romantic as my mind would like to make it. People sometimes did have great big houses and servants. But women also had ten plus children and died giving birth. Second, Jane's mother was a total hypochondriac in her later years, as Mrs. Bennet is in Pride and Prejudice (and there may be other parents in her other books with such an affliction but I can't remember for certain off the top of my head--I'm in the process of re-reading them now). She would often take to the sofa to lay down after dinner. But Jane, who at that time was already struggling with the disease that would kill her, would push together three chairs and lie down rather than asking her mother to leave the couch. She also refused to take the couch even when her mother wasn't using it because she knew her mother would never again take her rest there because she'd want Jane to have it. That just struck me as sad and kind and also so telling. This woman who could write the sharpest and funniest remarks about people was not petty or cruel in her actions and actually thought of others. It could have gone the other way. And finally, the disease that killed her is speculated to be lymphoma, like Hodgkin's Disease, which I'm pretty sure is treatable in a lot of people these days. She was only 41 when she died. And I cried when I read the description of her death, so slow and painful, and she was completely aware of what was happening to her. I think when you read someone's writing, you get this feeling of knowing them in some way.

Prep also made me cry but for totally different reasons. There are very good reasons why I don't read much literary fiction. I like happy books. No one is ever freaking happy in literary fiction, usually because they aren't happy with themselves to begin with. And when they are, you know it's only fleeting. That being said, I thought this was the best depiction of being awkward in high school and trust me, I know from awkward. I think one reviewer even said something like, "If you're feeling nostaligic for adolescence, this will cure it." And it's true. Good Lord, it was like being back in high school again with a little of early college thrown in (it's set in a boarding school, so some of the things really remind of me of college instead of high school, but it's all uncomfortable). All the anxiety about saying or doing the right thing, trying to control the uncontrollable people and world around you by doing or not doing something, the intensity of that first love--when I finished, I truly felt that skinless vulnerability I remembered from high school/early college. Eek. The author has an amazing ability to recreate reality, I don't know how else to describe it. It's definitely worth reading.

Okay, so I did not set out to write book reviews in here, but oh well.