To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Utterly random: I totally missed that Caroline Dhavernas played a bit part in an episode of SAJV. Huh. *insert obligatory "there are only thirty Canadian actors in existence" remark*

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I spent the week reading Emma, and to no one's greater surprise than my own, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Well, not the hell. Maybe just the heck. Or even the aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks, to get progressively more euphemistic and to further damn with faint praise. It did have its issues, such as being able to see Mr. Elton actually being interested in Emma rather than Harriet coming from 90 pages away. And in my edition, I believe that particular denoument actually came on page 85, so you can see how obvious it was. Also, Emma was certainly a twit at times. I so desperately wanted Harriet to, at the end of the book, call her on her twitiness, rather than being so freaking polite.

I did enjoy Mr. Knightley. He brought the snark, which was oh so necessary at times. Frank was cool too, even if he was caddish. At least he was lively. And despite its faults, the book chugged along at a pretty good pace for Austen (I read the first half all at once last Saturday). I particularly liked when the young people started playing a game with the little Knightleys's twig alphabet, if only because it reminded me of the line "We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs" in Billy Collins's "Nostalgia," which is one of my favorite poems.

Also, there was NO SIMPERING, YAY. Mucho gusto. Emma was stuck up, sure, but she didn't simper and she wasn't perfect. She made mistakes, got called on them, and acknowledged the errors, at least some of the time, unlike Miss Perfect, who never did anything wrong and whom everyone loved without exception. I can't imagine Emma having an attack of the vapors at being called competent, unlike SOME I could name. Jane, Harriet, and Mrs. Weston were fairly excellent as well.

But there's something about the smallness of the world in Austen's novels that bugs me--the limited settings, casts of characters, and prospects for those characters. I know she was writing what she knew, but I certainly do long for a trip to London even more than some of her characters do. I do appreciate that this novel makes use of the widest social strata Austen ever used in a book (according to one of the essays at the back of the Norton Critical Edition I checked out, anyway), which was interesting, but man...I almost enjoyed hearing about Maple Grove because it wasn't in freaking Surrey. And I hated Mrs. Elton--as one was supposed to--so that's saying something.

I just keep thinking of how Elizabeth Gaskell treats the same basic plot of P&P in North and South, for example, and I like that treatment a lot more than I like Austen's, because it both acknowledges and even for its plot depends on the existence of a world greater in geography and humanity than this tiny circumscribed village and class. (I guess part of the attraction of Austen's novels now is escape to that world of leisure--well, leisure accompanied by the very serious necessity for the women of finding a husband who could support them, which is fairly fascinating in its own right, I suppose--which I have absolutely nothing against, just...in smaller doses, maybe. And it can be a very, very long time before I read about everyone being concerned about catching cold from a draft in a hallway where they will spend all of five seconds walking from one end to the other, oh my GOD, people, you are all a bunch of raving HYPOCHONDRIACS.)

Now, onto The Voyage Out, which, if V.Wo is true to form, will be about a disheartened and suicidal married woman in London. Am I right?

Hooray! My third season Northern Exposure DVDs came today! I've mentioned before how awesome Amazon is, right? 'Cause I ordered these on Wednesday night, and got the free 5 to 9-day shipping on them, and they're here TODAY. Since I ordered them after business hours, that's essentially two-day shipping for free. Not quite as spectacular as the next-day shipping I got once when I was in Gambier, but still nothing to sneeze at. (And the DVDs were almost thirty percent off the list price! Yay!)

I suppose the postal service probably has more to do with this than Amazon, come to think of it. Either way, yay for infrastructure getting my indulgences to me with excellent speed. :)

And yes, for the next few weeks, you will all have to put up with my natterings about the best season of one of the best TV shows ever. I'll try to keep my glee contained under lj-cuts. *g*

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I finished off the BBC miniseries North and South (based on the novel of the same name by Elizabeth Gaskell) today. ( Reviewish thing. And talk about broody men. )

"Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her [Jane Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone." -- Mark Twain

This has absolutely nothing to do with anything; I just ran into the quote and found it so amusing that I had to post it. Plus, it gives me an excuse to use my "austen h8" tag again.

(Although I actually did like P&P, at least in small doses, when I was eighteen. Just...nothing else ever by her. Particularly Persuasion.)

Lord, give me patience, and give it to me RIGHT NOW. At least long enough to finish this STUPID book.

At least Pride and Prejudice had the always-amusing Mr. Bennett to help me along. Persuasion has...a Mary Sue. A really DUMB Mary Sue. And a lot of twittering girls, and at least two, possibly three men who are or will soon be related called "Charles," and a REALLY STUPID PLOT. Stupid like the "heroine," Anne, brushes off her boyfriend because he's of a lower social class, and when he comes back eight years later, all rich and suddenly a good, marriageable prospect, and yet has the gall to be interested in Anne's sister-in-law, she gets all whiny about it. But not in an actual whiny way, just a, "Oh! Could he possibly still love me? He looked at me when I was in the room with him for a moment! He must! Except I can't possibly approach him and ASK HIM because I am far too reserved and shy and I know my place in society!" kind of whiny, the kind that's so utterly perfect and self-sacrificing and sweet, to the point of inducing complete dental rot, that you just want to slap her.

I have never hated a character I'm supposed to like as much as I hate Anne. She's so consistently sweet and calm and good and I just want to kill her. Dude, she has to "pause a moment to recover from the emotion" of hearing the ex-boyfriend call her "proper" and "capable." OH MY GOD, HE CALLED ME CAPABLE! BE STILL, MY BEATING HEART!

And all the other characters are so obviously meant to be foils for Anne's innocence and light act, which is irritating in the most Mary Sue-ish of ways. At least Louisa seems to have a little PERSONALITY here and there, but she is ALWAYS compared to Anne, and Anne is of course perfect and wonderful and can do no wrong. Ever. Then Louisa gets knocked out and is laid up in bed for a while, thus taking any semblance of life the book might have had far, far away.

I still have eighty pages of this crap to slog through. Eighty more pages of simpering females, dull-as-dishwater men, little insinuations that Anne is the best thing since sliced bread, and OH MY GOD, I HATE THIS BOOK WITH THE PASSION OF A THOUSAND FIERY, BURNING SUNS.