Pride and Prejudice is top read is the news from the UK today! I'm quite a fan of Miss Austen and heartily applaud this choice as of popular reading material.
I discovered Austen only recently, after being misguided away from it in high school. Unlike many of the other dryer classics that I've waded through, I adore the trivial frivolity of Austen's works on their surface as well as the deeper commentary she includes with sly comments that you might miss on the first or third reading.
My favorite splits between the saucy Pride and Prejudice and the more gentle Persuasion. And while many will charge me with blasphemy, I even enjoyed the recent Keira Knightly movie. Mansfield Park has a strange little place in my heart, mostly going back to the summer I first read it and spent night questioning friends as to if they would ever consider marrying a first cousin.
Sense and Sensibility is just a little too emotional for me. I was an emotional teenager but I can't remember spending weeks lamenting the loss of a boyfriend in college. Perhaps women these days are more inured to such things. Or maybe Miss A was just making a complete mockery of a woman overcome continually with sensibility.
Any way around it, these are a delightful set of books and I particularly recommend the audiobooks as narrated by Nadia May if you can get your hands on them (hint: NYPL has them on their eNYPL section).
And if you enjoyed them and other classics, may I recommend The Eyre Affair and sequels by Jasper Fforde?
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