Pride and Prejudice: The first time I read Jane Austin was about five years ago when I read "Sense and Sensibility". I didn't much care for that book at the time, yet I was compelled to read it. I read "Pride and Prejudice" in September while I was on holiday in Vancouver Island. I was taking a train ride to Victoria, and it was then I fell in love with the book and Austin's prose. The book succeeds all its expectations on being a wonderful romance, plus having a heroine which was written in the 19th century but was so modern and witty. I can understand why "Pride and Prejudice" holds such esteem to classic readers.
Our Mutual Friend: Dickens' final finished book, one I read for the first time this past November. When I read the beginning paragraph of a Dickens book, I am automatically transported to his time and place, his characters more than any other writer's become alive in my mind, his themes are universal and I am constantly touched by his books. I'm like a broken record, I am very unhappy that I have read all of his finished novels now. I still have "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" to read, but it will be incomplete, it's not difficult to wonder why Dickens was so beloved, and why he is still revered today as the greatest novelist of all time. Despite what cynics think, his books I will cherish for all time.
True Grit A wonderful little compact book just a little over 200 pages tells the story of a young girl in the frontier time who hires a marshall named Rooster Cogburn to hunt the man that killed her father. The story is told from the girl's perspective and has that wonderful sense of old American dialect mostly associated with Mark Twain. The book is a great yarn, I couldn't put it down, it was just very entertaining not to mention the filmed remake of this year which I put as the best time I had at the movies so far this year.
Robinson Crusoe: Another book of mine that has been lying on my shelf for years and just waiting for someone to open its pages so that it might live. I finally read the book that I was curious about for sharing my same name. It is a classic story, yet it is very much one that is of its time, telling the story of a permanently unlucky britishman who is stranded on a desert island for 28 years. For most of that time he spends it alone fending for himself and having a spiritual awakening in the process. Yet the politics the book depicts of the time are very old fashioned, when it is revealed that the reason Robinson Crusoe goes on his voyage is to find slaves to work on his plantation, it's also disheartening to see the way he treats his tribal companion Friday whom he rescues. Despite Crusoe's spiritual awakening, it doesn't stop him from treating Friday as a sub creature, more of a pet than a man. Of course in one way, the novel could be thought of as an allegory of the civilization of the western world, there is probably no inaccuracy the way Crusoe is depicted. Yet the book fell apart at the end when Crusoe does get back to civilization, and it takes too much time discussing his financial issues of the plantation. Here was a man stranded on an island for 28 years, someone who learns to fend for himself, yet when he returns, it's business as usual, he seems to have learned nothing from his experience, only now he has a loyal companion who will work for him for free. Amazingly enough, I learned "Robinson Crusoe" was the most popular novel of the 19th century.
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