Books on Love, Part II: Optimists Version

Their Eyes Were Watching God  by Zora Neale Hurston -- My favorite thing about this novel is that I read it in school and in our discussion it quickly became obvious that everyone had a completely different opinion on which man was Janie Crawford's one true love. This one's all about love as life-long journey.

Middlemarch by George Eliot -- Three different central love stories, each very distinct. Everyone has their favorite, and Fred Vincy's struggle to demonstrate his worth to Mary is definitely mine. Not just a great love story, one of the best novels ever written.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton -- Does not qualify for everyone's definition of a "love story," but I think there's something really beautiful and admirable about the central relationship between Newland Archer and his wife May Welland. Her cousin the Countess Olenska shows up and Newland wastes about 400 pages in a cloud of passion and lust but still marries May in the end; they have a very long, happy marriage and several lovely children. Some people hate this ending, but I'm a huge fan of it because it feels very possible, plus, Winona Ryder is May Welland in the film adaptation and I will never not take her side.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- A widow revisits her first love after the death of her husband and the results are beautiful and sad. There is a stillness to this novel that absolutely knocks you to the floor.

Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling -- Because there is no greater literary love than the slow-burning relationship between [SPOILER ALERT] Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. She gives him up to fight the greatest darkness the world has ever known and a part of me was secretly mad that she didn't divorce him before the epilogue scene.

Persuasion by Jane Austen -- Because there has to be a Jane Austen on the list and this one is very quietly the best Jane Austen novel.

Book Trailers: 'Anna Karenina' by Leo Tolstoy

Joe Wright's 'Anna Karenina' is the movie trailer we all have to thank for the idea of Book Trailers in the first place; I saw the trailer, as did my fellow book club members. We swooned, appropriately, and agreed on a two-month commitment to the novel, which luckily none of us had yet successfully finished. Now I'm very glad we did it because I really, really love the novel.

This feels like the appropriate moment to digress on the nature of film adaptations of literary source material, because as you can probably tell from the trailer, this is not a traditional movie adaptation. The screenplay for this particular version of Anna Karenina was written by the playwright Tom Stoppard, and there is a very self-aware, theatrical vibe to the entire thing, which I found to be utterly charming and visually stunning. And most importantly, it was something that could only be achieved on camera, making this Anna Karenina distinctly a film that knows it's a film. Some people hated it; those are probably the same folks who hate Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice, which is not a word-for-word translation of the novel; he tweaks and cuts and rewrites here and there, and in some instances, he uses music, or camera movement, or lighting, or costumes to communicate with the audience. Jane Austen or Leo Tolstoy fans balk at this kind of faithlessness, but Joe Wright is not a novelist, he's a film director, and he is using the tools of the cinema to tell the story. I don't have a problem with a good Masterpiece Theater production that is extremely faithful and literal, but I admire and enjoy much more literary adaptations that take some risks do things that can only be done in a movie.

This version of Anna Karenina is a perfect example of that, as it communicates so much of the story without dialogue. And it is an absolute masterpiece of film aesthetics -- regardless of whether or not you "like" or approved of the adaptation, you remember certain scenes and moments because they were so beautifully executed. I'm feeling woozy just thinking about it. And I don't think I need to remind you that it's cold outside and you need to watch a movie in which an entire train is magically frozen solid.

Book Trailers is a recurring post that tricks you into reading the books that inspired great movies (or just great trailers).

The Bookhive List: 'Emma' by Jane Austen

It is no secret I am a devoted Jane Austen fan. I try to stay above the fray of that nonsensical, romantic-comedy obsessed side of her fandom, but that isn't always possible (Example: I watch all the movie adaptations, good, bad or otherwise). But I do credit myself a bit for having read all of her novels along with much of her other writing (unfinished novels and letters), as well as a healthy portion of Jane Austen biography and criticism.

One of the distinct pleasures of Jane Austen is the subsequent re-readings that most fans indulge in throughout their lives. You cannot read a Jane Austen novel once and consider yourself a fan; instead you must semi-annually dive back into the world of Regency England and plunder the depths of her novels for new discoveries, for which you are always richly rewarded.

Many people can plot their devotion to Jane via their changing preferences for her characters and novels; everyone begins with Pride and Prejudice, and everyone fancies themselves to be a Lizzie Bennet {Side Note: Why are women so obsessed with identifying themselves with specific characters, as if woman characters in novels were all archetypes of female personalities?  That said, I am totally a Jo March of Little Women, and in Anne of Green Gables I am obviously a Marilla Cuthbert). Along with everyone else, I adored P and P and identified very strongly with the "coltish" bookworm Lizzie, but as I made the transition into young adulthood I started to love and admire and detest and empathize more and more with Emma.  Like so many young adults, Emma is supremely confident in her abilities, and everyone around her constantly reinforces that confidence, although her actions are constantly contradicting everyone's faith in her. She does not do anything half-way and when fails, she fails spectacularly; but because she is a Jane Austen heroine, she inevitably learns her lesson and tries her best to do better, although Austen knows and we know that Emma will probably fail many more times in her life. Of all the Austen novels, I think it's the funniest, and the peripheral characters are really hilarious and awful, but it's easy to laugh at them and then realize that you are no better or different from Emma, who is doing the exact same thing. I have a strong hunch that in a few years I'll make the switch to preferring Persuasion (as all women over 30 must do eventually), so in the meantime, I'm going to savor these last few years with my Austen avatar, Emma.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

This Week in Books is Rather Slow...

As I mentioned recently, Facebook has a book club; not surprisingly, the first "meeting" did not go well, due largely to Facebook's algorithms, which did not display comments or questions in any kind of logical order. By the way, if the idea of online book clubs intrigue you, I highly recommend The Atlantic's version, 1Book140.

The American Scholar put together a list of neglected novels that ought to be considered "classics." I strongly agree with the Elizabeth Gaskell pick; just this week I read an essay in which Gaskell was carelessly tossed aside for being less great than Jane Austen. No one is as great as Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Gaskell was a terrific writer.

The Shortlist for the 2015 Tournament of Books has been announced (actually it was out a few weeks ago, I just wasn't paying attention). I've only read one book on the list, but I've got Elena Ferrante's first Neapolitan novel and Station Eleven on the Kindle. Winners will be determined in March.

Books on Books: 'Northanger Abbey' by Jane Austen

There are probably no readers of Bookhive who haven't read something by Jane Austen in their lives, but most people skip over Northanger Abbey in favor of the more popular novels. It's certainly not my favorite, but it has its own unique charms, which for me have been recently enhanced by my enjoyment of the audio book version of The Mysteries of Udolpho, a novel that Catherine, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, reads with breathless enthusiasm. (I will take a brief moment to acknowledge that a post on audio books is long overdue; the whole reason I was listening to this particular one was because I wanted to write about the medium as a way of "reading"). 

The naive Catherine reads The Mysteries of Udolpho, a very popular gothic novel in Jane Austen's lifetime, written by fellow female author Ann Radcliffe, and it sparks a kind of paranoid fantasy in her own life, as she sees parallels to the novel in everything, much to her detriment. As to be expected, Catherine learns her lesson and ends the novel happily, but the real pleasure of the novel is in the meditations on the art of fiction and the nature of reading. Jane Austen's genius lies partially in her ability to sneak up on the reader with profundity hidden in what feel like very minute details, so a novel about an 18 year old bookworm is really a startlingly self-aware novel about storytelling, fiction, narrative, and readership. It deserves more credit than it usually gets, and Ann Radcliffe's novel warrants a reading, if only for its own significance in context.

Books on Books: 'The Madwoman in the Attic' by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

I first came across The Madwoman in the Attic via Madeleine's thesis project in The Marriage Plot, but I'm surprised that I made it through four years of humanities studies without having read it, as I, much like the fictional Madeleine, spent a lot of time with books that were described as "discourses." The Madwoman in the Attic is the O.G. of feminist readings of fiction, and its influence cannot be overstated. I've been thinking a lot about it recently as I was reading Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, whose very title and premise are something of an homage. The book is largely concerned with female authors like Jane Austen, the Brontes, and Virginia Woolf, and it's a really excellent follow-up to anyone who has already read and enjoyed some of the major women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It's easy to find a first edition at any decent used book store (especially those in college towns), but do yourself a favor a pickup a newer copy that include their revised introduction, which should give you a better taste of the cultural impact the book had on feminism and literature.