troisoiseaux

Shook up my annual re-read of Pride & Prejudice by listening to an audiobook— it's delightful to be able to experience a book I've read many, many (many) times in a new way! I don't think I've ever really noticed how present the (mostly unnamed) servants are in this novel: how frequently it mentions someone asking a servant to do something, or worrying about speaking of private matters in front of them, etc. The other thing that stuck out to me this time was, re: Darcy's insulting first proposal— what on earth was his plan if Elizabeth had said yes?!

Halfway through The Ionian Mission by Patrick O'Brian; only he could write an entire chapter about a ship's crew preparing for a sea battle that doesn't actually happen, because the ships in question are both too good at playing "don't shoot first" chicken, that's just as compelling as an actual battle scene and isn't ruined by the anticlimax.

I have a certain morbid curiosity for bad movies. My friend worked as a camp counselor one summer and complained so much about her campers' obsession with Descendants 2 that I insisted we watch it. I paid money to see Cats (2019). The only reason I did not see Morbius (2022) is that I was was busy with finals. Which is to say, when I saw Persuasion (2022) universally panned (my personal favorite is "everyone involved should be in prison") I knew it was a matter of when, not if, I would watch it.

My impression going into this movie is that the pitch was "Persuasion, but make it Fleabag," except that no one involved had ever actually read Persuasion. Coming out of it, I'm not entirely convinced they've watched Fleabag, either, although they have definitely seen Pride & Prejudice (2005).

An incomplete but illustrative list of things that I texted a friend while watching this:

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This did not have to be an entirely unsalvagable movie! Even though Dakota Johnson has an unshakable vibe of knowing what a podcast is, she could have been a bearable Anne if the writers had just cut out the quirky nonsense: the pet bunny that she cuddles in random scenes, the blurting out a dream about an octopus (?!) during an awkward tea party. Wentworth, on the other hand, was incredibly poorly cast - and not just because I couldn't get over how the guy who did the song about gay pirates getting hatecrimed is apparently an actor now?? - and came across as kind of a dick. (Speaking of which, I am shocked that they didn't work the line about "Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name" in there somewhere, since they tried to make innuendo out of basically everything else, including "bushels" and "calling cards" and "European tours.") So: if they'd gone with different casting for at least Wentworth, maybe also Anne, and toned down the Quirkiness™ and also the effort at a """modern translation"""*, we could have had— not a good adaption of Persuasion, not the adaption of Persuasion that we need and deserve, but one not notably, comically worse than other Austen adaptions in existence.

Then again, if the goal was to make an Austen adaption as a comedy framed through stylistic references to a popular contemporary media genre/tropes, why did they have to do it to Persuasion when Northanger Abbey is right there???

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Read Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh— I jumped several books and more than a decade ahead in the series with this one, landing at a point in the timeline where Alleyn and Agatha Troy are married with a precocious 6-year-old. Wild plot - cults! kidnapping! drug trafficking! undercover sting operations! - verging on the downright goofy, but a fun read.

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Read Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, which is... hm. Not my favorite of her novels. I tried to read this for the first time when I was on an Austen kick a few years ago, but I didn't get very far - I think I made it to the introduction to the Crawfords? - because everyone was just so mean to poor Fanny Price. This time I made it far enough before questioning my life choices (...not to mention the characters') that it seemed worth powering through rather than giving up again.

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Having now officially read all of Austen's (finished, "real") novels at least once, I read Helena Kelly's Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, which I once had my hands on in a bookstore back when it was possible to go places and touch things, and which in retrospect I'm relieved I didn't buy. It provided some interesting context about the social, political, and literary landscape in which Austen was writing her novels and the lens through which her contemporary audience would understand them, but some of Kelly's textual interpretations and conclusions about Austen's intent seemed like a stretch, and her first two chapters, on Northanger Abbey and Sense & Sensibility, left me feeling so ??? that I found myself approaching the rest of the book with more caution than enthusiasm.

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I also finished The Brothers Karamazov, which I will write up in its own post later because this one has gone on for long enough.