Recently Read: Rereading Austen

It’s become something of a habit: I keep picking up new books to read without finishing the last one.

I can’t see it ever stopping, though. It’s nice, sometimes, to have several books on the go. I scatter them around the place, so wherever I sit, I have a book I’m reading. It just means that it takes me a while to read anything.

The only book I’ve completed in the past month has been Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which I’m following up with a reread of her Emma. Partly this is because I kept coming across clips of the 1995 BBC adaptation of P&P, so I just had to reread it. I’d forgotten how snide she can be! The comment that really sticks out, though, is from Persuasion (which will probably be reread after Emma), when she says something about how Richard Musgrove had never done anything, living or dead, to deserve more than the abbreviation of his name.

It’ll be a season of Austen, I expect, having followed the watching of P&P with the 1995 Sense and Sensibility. I never could see Alan Rickman as the villain after seeing his Colonel Brandon. (Likewise Mark Strong, after his Mr Knightley, if it comes to that.)

The intention, with all these Austens, is to get me into the right frame of mind/period to tackle the Poldark trilogy. And perhaps to watch the series, though I’ll save that for once I’ve read the books.

In my other corners, though, I’m still reading The Bear and the Nightingale, and The Midnight Library.