I finished The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl and really enjoyed it. It’s great for anyone who enjoys historical fiction or just a good mystery. Well written. I actually went online and read about Oliver Wendell Holmes and Longfellow and Lowell and some of the others as a consequence. I also have an inkling – but only an inkling – of desire to read Dante’s Inferno now. Maybe I will. One of my favorite parts was that the poet’s publisher was Houghton – as in Houghton Mifflin – and their editor was Ticknor & Fields – now a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin! Very cool. I also didn’t know that Abraham Lincoln’s cousin was governor of Massachusetts shortly after the Civil War.
After The Dante Club, I moved on to Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter. I really enjoyed this one, also. Tan touches on the mother-daughter theme in basically all of her books, but it doesn’t seem repetitious. I know by the time I read my third Ayn Rand novel, I was like, “Okay, I get it, socialism bad, capitalism good” (I’m still hoping that Galt’s Gulch really does exist – I SO want to live there). But I don’t have the same reaction to Tan’s books. I have The Kitchen God’s Wife coming in a Powell’s order, and that’s the last of her books in paperback. That will have to be it for awhile, as I don’t buy hardback except in really important cases (like Jan Karon’s novels).
The last book I read was really done on a lark. My friend Greene Teacher, who is a huge fan of Victorian novels, mentioned she was reading Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. One of her students – a former student of mine – had recommended it. The only way I can describe this novel is as P&P meets trashy romance novel. The title is a pretty accurate description of what happens in the book – Mr. Darcy takes his wife – over and over again! Jane Austen must be blushing in her grave! This is one of the few P&P sequels that deals with the newly married couple as main characters rather than part of the subplot cast, which was nice, but I just don’t think the author did a very good job with the novel as a whole. Austen’s characters lost their backbone – Elizabeth Bennett in particular – and the storyline she wove – for 500+ small-print pages – just wasn’t that engaging. I must admit to skimming parts. On HP’s recommendation, I have ordered the Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentlemen series – not a sequel, but an alternative perspective to P&P. Oh, and if any Austen fans haven’t seen the new version of her very popular novel, go see it. It was great.
What’s next? March by Gwendolyn Brooks. Another Greene Teacher recommendation, this is a story about Mr. March’s experience in the war during Little Women. Haven’t even read the first page, but I’m looking forward to it.
1 comment:
I liked Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife by Linda Berdoll for that reason that it is so different from Austen. Weren't you just hoping for a passionate marriage for Darcy and Elizabeth? At least you get that from this book. She is actually publishing a follow-up to that book as well. I don't know the publishing date. I will admit that I skipped over parts, but I do that with nearly every book I read. A terrible habit of mine, except that when I read the book again I feel like I'm getting something new!
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