Reading and Drinking in the Kingdom

So remember how a couple of friends and I started a classics book club? Well, I pulled my little, “I’m a princess” routine at our first meeting, and while the majority of the book selection process was democratic… I dictatored my way into Jane Austen’s Persuasion (fortunately, everyone was fairly agreeable) because I have always wanted to read that book. My enthusiasm even demanded I host that discussion, and that we read that book FIRST! We'll see if there's mutiny in the book club. Eh! What do I care, as long as I get my night of hosting the Jane Austen novel?

With visions of finger sandwiches and tea dancing through my head, I immediately bought the prettiest version of the book available from the Tattered Cover, and set into reading, what some call Jane’s best work.

The second night in, though, I had a thought. “This is all so familiar. Her books are all running together in my head. It’s the same, self-restrained-to-the-point-of-mental-straightjacket-dom, 19th century British literature that I love, but o.k., it’s nothing new. I was hoping for something a little more from her final novel.”

The third night I continued down my, “It’s like I’ve read this book before,” train-of-thought. (Though I was still engrossed enough in it to miss meeting The Funasaurus for dinner at IHOP. And that’s a Big Deal, considering how hungry I had told him I was when he called me from the road and offered to go out to dinner.) “This reminds me so much of that one story where the chick falls off the wall at the beach, and the other chick shares a clandestine look with a stranger on some stairs…” the mental images came rolling in, as I read about their walking around the moors between the manor houses with nary a beach in sight.

Then I turned the page and they got in their carriages and drove to Lyme, where the one chick falls off the wall at the beach and the other chick shares a clandestine look with a stranger on some stairs.

Apparently… I have read this book before.

So much for finally reading all of Jane Austen’s works. Turns out I did that many years ago. Derrrr.

So, ah. I don’t exactly remember how it ends (though it is Jane Austen, I’d bet money they end up together at the end, after all hope had been lost, and live happily ever after) so I shall continue on. It’s a good book. And fortunately, worth re-reading.

That’s about it for my life recently. Well, besides the fact that I passed up a massage for a glass of cheap cabernet, last night. It was worth it. Cabernet is kind of like a Swedish for the frontal lobe.