Thursday, September 23, 2010

Austenland


I will be honest. This is a silly book.

I saw it on the bookshelf of a recently made friend and asked her about it and she offered to let me borrow it. Now I didn't know this girl very well at the time, and even now, I don't know her extremely well and she doesn't know me that well either. I mention this in an attempt to explain that we weren't good enough friends for her to know my literature taste enough to know whether or not to recommend this book to me. She may have known it is a little ridiculous, but not known whether I am a ridiculous-book loving fool. Who knows.

In any case, when I started the book I kind of cringed as I read it because it uses phrases like "freaked me out" and other such phrases that sadly we all use in real life, but do not always find pleasure in finding them in literature. But the book is really short, so I decided to press on. And by the end of the book, I'll admit that I had started to kind of like it. It is nowhere near making any sort of "favorites" or "top . . . " anything for that matter, but it was just kind of a fun read by the end.

It is about a 30-year old girl who has never married and has an obsession with Jane Austen and Mr. Darcy and ends up getting the opportunity to go to this "Austenland" for 3 weeks where everyone takes on the lifestyle and customs of that time.

Like I said, it is a silly book but really light reading and if you are looking for just a fun, silly read that will only take you 3 or 4 hours, this isn't a BAD book, but it's not great either. Make sense?

6 comments:

kate said...

BUT I also must say that it is not such a ridiculous book that I found myself wanting to hide it as I read it in public places as I did with the Twilight series or others of the same kind.

PS Would we consider the Twilights to be "bodice rippers"? I think so.

Erin said...

I might. They are pretty risque, I don't think I'll let my daughters read Twilight (if they even want to, it won't be 2009 anymore) until they are like 18.

Well, as we've said, sometimes you need a quick little read that won't make you think too much or feel too deeply. Books like that are a necessity. Thanks Kate!

(Oh, and I got an email today from the library saying that Glass Castle is ready for me to pick up. So as soon as I read that I'll do a little review on here!)

Andrea said...

I read a book that is like that called "Jane Austen Ruined my Life" and it was the same type of thing. Not well written, but I enjoyed the light read.

Also, I saw a book at the library just barely that is about Jane Austen and she has been roaming the world as a vampire for the last 2 centuries. What is it with this new fiction centered around Jane Austen all of the sudden?

Erin said...

I think Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the beginning of it all. So there's that like hipster, weird side of it, but there's also THIS side of it, the cutesy kind. Yeah, that's weird!

And there was the Jane Austen Book Club movie, which I did not see, but have heard of.

ALSO, the guy that wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies just wrote one called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter that I saw at the store. I can't imagine actually sitting down and reading the whole book of any of those. Maybe a chapter, but. . .

LL said...

Jane Austen Book Club movie = super weird. Mildly entertaining, but mostly weird.

Chazlyn Robbins said...

Hilarious! I laughed out loud while reading it.