pride and prejudice by jane austen

i must start by publicly acknowledging my shame in not having read pride and prejudice before this, my thirtieth year. how did it happen? i have watched and adored the movie (either version) a million times! i have adored the other jane austen novels i read. why? why, did i procrastinate? there is no answer, my friends. i was just a slacker.

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what can i say about pride and prejudice that has not already been said by a million readers before me. fantastic. joyous. witty. i wish elizabeth were my best friend. i wish mr. darcy (and his ten thousand per year) were mine all mine. however, i will say i could do with a scene in which wickham is humiliated and lydia is slapped silly! but what can you do?

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how lovely it is to find an author that unabashedly give us happy endings. sometimes you just need one! jane is absolutely one of my go-to authors. i'm so glad i finally made pride and prejudice a priority. it will most definitely be re-read several times in my life.

1984 by george orwell

i have officially finished my first book of 2009. (to be perfectly honest, i started reading in in 2008, but really, who's paying that much attention) so what to say about 1984 . . . i decided to read this book because i wanted to read something that had a long history of being banned. at first i picked "the handmaid's tale" by margaret atwood, but i was going to be reading the book with someone else, and i was told that "the handmaid's tale" has a lot of swearing, so we decided to read 1984 instead. i read "animal farm" in high school and i vehemently hated it, so i was a little leery of reading anything else by george orwell, but i enjoyed the first half of the book. i thought it was engaging, and i had respect the main character. about 3/4 of the way through, it took quite a turn and mr. orwell lost me. the entire tone of the novel changed. instead of inspiring it became depressing. i don't know that it would be appropriate to say that i liked the book . . . or that i disliked it. i am very glad i read it. it did make me contemplate on some of the ideas he presented in the beginning . . . but i'm not entirely sure i would recommend it to anyone.