So... here I am, trying to catch up with my 50 books. Luckily for me, it is summer vacation, and I can do just that. Until I am caught up, however, I'll be condensing reviews into several books per post, at least until I finish Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, which is a brick (but a fun brick so far).
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) - Before I get into this review, full disclosure time: I have picked up P&P several times, I own at least two really pretty copies of it, and before now, had never read it. This was how my inner dialogue usually went: I could read Pride and Prejudice... eh, I've seen the BBC miniseries AND the Keira-Knightly movie..that's enough for me to sound smart about it in conversations, right?
I know, I know, worst librarian/English major ever.
The second embarrassing thing is that I read Longbourn first (reviewed below), which is what inspired me to finally read P&P. I listened to the audiobook on my commute, narrated by the effortlessly graceful actress Lindsay Duncan, and found myself transported into a world of green gardens with wrought-iron gates and porcelain teacups with hand-painted roses. It was nice to get lost in Darcy and Elizabeth's (often hilariously) genteel anguish, knowing the happy ending was always in sight. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though the Colin-Firth's-clingy-shirt-in-the-pond scene doesn't happen in the novel. C'est la vie.
Longbourn (Jo Baker) - Upstairs, Downstairs was a British soap opera from the 70's that was Downton Abbey before Downton Abbey was Downton Abbey. That is to say, it was a show that chronicled the lives and loves of the rich folks in an English manor (upstairs) AND their oft unseen servants (downstairs). Longbourn does something similar, only it tells us the stories of the heretofore invisible servants in Pride and Prejudice, with the drama of P&P unfolding upstairs. The book was utterly transporting, with gorgeous prose and impeccable research into daily life of the Regency-Era landed gentry (I was kind of swoon-y through the whole book, even if there were descriptions of cleaning out the privy). What made Longbourn set my little literary-nerd heart aflutter, though, was when the upstairs drama, unfolding in the background, would intersect with the downstairs drama. The well-known upstairs characters of P&P would have surprisingly deep and direct ties to the downstairs characters in Longbourn, and every time a new revelation would unfold, I would end up looking like one of those YouTube compilation videos of people reacting to twists on Game of Thrones. My consensus? The book was like a flourless chocolate cake: you want to devour the whole thing in three bites, but you also want to savor it, slowly, enjoying every morsel. My copy better get used to its relatively pristine condition now, because it's going to end up one of those well-loved trade paperbacks with lines down the spine and dog-eared pages.
