For the love of Jane
There's been a lot of Heavy around these parts lately. And there's a lot more I haven't even begun to address or share on the ol' blog. I'll get to some of it, but for now, I think it's about time for some simple truths, no? How about this one:
Shame, humiliation, disgrace: hard feelings to accept if you've been brought up to believe that you should never have to experience any pain. ... No suffering, no growth—and no recollection, no suffering. We have to see what we've done, we have to feel it, and finally, we have to remember it. ...
How tempting it is to rewrite our personal history in a more flattering way, and how familiar we all are with the person who experiences a moment of self-knowledge—after a breakup or a failure or a sin—only to go right back to being the same person they always were. For Austen, maturation means refusing to forget. Humiliation, for her, is a gift that keeps on giving.
One of my very favorite recent reads was A Jane Austen Education. I've underlined and marked so many pages, and as soon as I finished it, I wanted to read it again. Perhaps most surprisingly, it's written by a man. It's the best non-scholarly scholarly thing I've read about Jane and her work. Basically, it's a book not only about Jane Austen and her work, but it's also about how reading can change your life.
I wrote about the book more in a review for BlogHer (no spoilers):
In A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz chronicles many years’ worth of mining Austen’s works as well as distilling what he found into distinct categories: everyday matters, growing up, learning to learn, being good, true friends, and falling in love. He very aptly adapted the lessons from her novels—which could be denigrated to “quaint” or relegated to the beautifully (if not twitterpatedly) cinematic (Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen, be still my heart!)—to make sense, actually startlingly practical sense, in today’s social constructs.
Click here to read the rest.
So tell me, any books cut you to the core lately?