Category Archives: Books

Remembering Jane

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Jane Austen, one of England’s foremost and most beloved novelists, died 200 years ago today, July 18, 1817, at the age of 41. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral where thousands travel every year to pay their respects. Five years ago I went there myself, chasing Jane. I’ve chased Jane for much of my life, loving the wit, depth, and challenge of Jane Austen’s novels since day one. I studied abroad in the spring of 2012 in Bath, England, taking classes through Oxford and interning at the Jane Austen Centre. Living in Bath was a dream come true for a Janeite. Every day, I walked by places she lived and buildings and pathways she describes intimately in her novels. I explored who I was, the things I loved, and when I returned to New York I changed my major and embraced my desire to work in book publishing.

And now, dear readers, how could I possibly leave you without a list of books to satisfy all of your Jane Austen desires?

Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin

One of the most well-recognized biographies of Jane Austen’s life, it’s also my favorite. It’s a vivid and immensely rich portrayal of Jane Austen, dismantling the image of Austen as a sheltered spinster. It’s not a light read by any means—Austen’s life was filled with tragedy and frustration—but it’s so worth the time. I’d also recommend Jane Austen’s Letters edited by Deirdre Le Faye.

 

Longbourn by Jo Baker

“If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.”

I’m often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of Jane Austen spin-offs and retellings available but if I could only read one it would be Longbourn by Jo Baker. It’s a downstairs retelling of Pride and Prejudice and while it has all of the romance and drama of the original it also captures the daily life of the lower classes in Regency England during the Napoleonic Wars. It adds this level of grit and nuance to the original that is fascinating.

 

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz

Don’t let anyone fool you—men love Jane Austen too! A Jane Austen Education by book critic William Deresiewicz is part memoir and part analysis of all six of Austen’s novels. Deresiewicz looks back at the arrogant young man he was when he first read Austen and details the lessons he’s taken away from each novel (Northanger Abbey: learning to learn, Persuasion: true friends.) It’s honest and moving and has this sweet, poignant ending that I just adored.

 

Other fun (and some bizarre, but hey I’m no purist) related titles that I recommend:

Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom by Deborah Yaffe

Austenland by Shannon Hale

Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Novel by Helen Fielding

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

Jane and the Damned by Janet Mullany

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith

Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen by Arielle Eckstut and Dennis Ashton

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters

(Cover picture is from Penguin Books USA, shared on their Twitter. Isn’t it beautiful?)

New Orleans Adventures

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I’m realizing I never posted most of the pictures from our trip to New Orleans. Pictures include our explorations of the city, our Honey Island swamp tour, and Oak Alley Plantation.

Review: Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett

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Review: Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett

If I could gush about this book for hours I absolutely would! Rabbit Cake follows Elvis and her family as they cope with the death of her mom. Hartnett’s understanding of grief is startling and honest. There’s a clever balance of dark humor and grief with these light (sometimes laugh out loud) funny moments. It’s quirky, funny, and an absolute delight! (Oh, and I saw Hartnett at a reading at Brookline Booksmith earlier this month and she’s just great. See her pic below of a rabbit cake tin!)

Twelve-year-old Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn’t yet know―like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother’s silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother’s death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama. As hilarious a storyteller as she is heartbreakingly honest, Elvis is a truly original voice in this exploration of grief, family, and the endurance of humor after loss.”

Review: A Greater Music by Bae Suah

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Review: A Greater Music by Bae Suah. Translated by Deborah Smith

My latest review on Three Percent!

A Greater Music is the first in a line of steady and much-anticipated releases by Bae Suah from key indie presses (this one published by Open Letter). Building off of the interest of 2016 Best Translated Book Award longlist nominee Nowhere to Be Found, Bae Suah is back, this time with Deborah Smith, translator of the Man Booker Prize winner The Vegetarian and founder of Tilted Axis, a UK-based press dedicated to publishing new works in translation.

In the book’s opening chapters, the narrator—who remains unnamed—falls into an icy river in the suburbs of Berlin. A Korean writer and student living in Germany, she begins to look back over the years, blurring lines between past and present as she examines her relationship with Joachim, her on-and-off, working class boyfriend, and M, her German tutor, a refined and enigmatic young woman she’s in love with. The contrast between these two partners and the tensions around language and class are fascinating, but I had a hard time just getting past how gorgeous the writing was.

The narrator describes M, setting the scene for their many discussions of music and language, “The rain water trickled down M’s pale, almost ghost-like forehead, down over her eyelids, still more sunken after her recent cold, and over her slightly-downward pointed nose. When she tilted her head upward, her lips appeared unbelievably thin and delicate, tapering elegantly even when she wasn’t smiling, flushed red as though suffused by the morning sunlight. The delicate, languidly prominent scaffolding of her cheekbones . . . If books and language were the symbol of M’s absolute world, then music was her inaccessible mind, her religion, her soul.”
The narrative is constantly shifting, pliable, and fluid, in both tense and setting. The construction seems effortless, allowing the narrator to sift through her life, her relationships, and most importantly the end of her relationship with M to find closure in it all. Her memory, one can’t forget, is imperfect—an approximation and perhaps a reinvention.

The style of the writing evokes the very music that seems to drive the story. Smith in an interview with Tobias Carroll for Vol. 1 Brooklyn stated, “When I was translating her, the thing that I was most aware of was trying not to smooth out the weirdness too much. . . . It becomes quite hypnotic when you read it in Korean, and quite lyrical in places as well. She writes a lot about music, and the other thing that her style evokes is that. It’s more about the cadence of the sentence. The core book itself, the structure, is more about variations on a theme, and coming back to certain motifs rather than a straight chronology.”

Thankfully for readers, Bae Suah is prolific and Deborah Smith seems determined to bring these great books to English language readers.

The Bear and the Nightingale

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Another incredible recommendation by my fabulous Children’s lit/YA literary agent friend. This incredible fairy tale retelling by Katherine Arden is an impressive debut (and the first in a trilogy!) Lyrical and evocative, The Bear and the Nightingale is a fascinating portrayal of Medieval Russia—full of the old spirits, feudal life, Christianity, and a sprinkling of historical and literary references (the epigraph is a poem by Pushkin!) I took many Russian literature classes in college and this book brought all of that back to me.

 

Review: We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories

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Review: We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories by Clare Beams

Another brilliant book club pick from the phenomenal small press book club at Brookline Booksmith. I was blown away by this debut short story collection by Clare Beams and published by Lookout Books. The stories, individually and as a whole, were startling, creepy, and gorgeously written. She’s been likened to a mix of Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson and I think that’s a fitting combination. The Rumpus did a great review, discussing the stories in more detail and the feminist nature of the book—you can find it here.