Occasionally I worry that I’m not addressing the novel on its own terms, but mostly I feel glad that Alicia Silverstone’s fundamental adorability and goodness makes it possible for me to keep liking Emma Woodhouse even when she’s being terrible. And she is being pretty terrible in the first volume of Emma.

Where other Jane Austen heroines are slightly outsiders, or teetering on the brink of the possibility of outsiderdom, Emma Woodhouse is wealthy, beautiful, and happy to remain single all her days.

“But still, you will be an old maid! and that’s so dreadful!”

 

“Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a general public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any body else.

Her motivation isn’t achieving any kind of security — she’s as secure as a person can be. It’s really just finding ways to fill her empty days, whether that be with charitable works (likeable!) or pseudo-charitable works like fixing up Harriet with a posh guy (ick). Jane Austen admitted from the outset that Emma was a heroine nobody but herself would much like, and a big part of that is the privilege Emma’s lived in all her life.

Luckily, Alicia Silverstone! Look how cute she is when she’s self-satisfied!

Jane Austen is a smart lady. The storyline that frames the first volume of Emma is about someone who takes Emma’s obsession with class to its logical conclusion. Mr. Elton, the match Emma wants for Harriet, thinks of Harriet the way Emma thinks of the Martins: Good enough in her place, but not a person deserving of any serious consideration or respect. His mindset isn’t the least bit different to Emma’s, just aimed in another direction.

Another piece of brilliance by Jane Austen is that she’s given us an unreliable narrator, and it’s fun — because the stakes are low — to watch Emma’s certainty and enthusiasm as she races full-tilt towards disappointment. You know that Emma is basically good-natured, and also that she’s untouchable by external forces, so she’s only going to do damage to herself. While, you know, growing as a person, and fighting with Paul Rudd over the remote control.

If you aren’t watching Emma Approved, by the way, I recommend it to you once again. Currently it’s on hiatus, and you can catch yourself up before its return in February. The series so far runs to basically the end of the first volume of Emma, when Mr. Elton hits on Cher in the car.

The writers do a fantastic job at making Emma difficult to like at first, and then letting you see the chinks in her armor of self-confidence. Joanne Sotomura, who plays Emma, has wonderful chemistry with Brent Bailey, who plays Mr. Knightley; they perfectly capture the mixture of affection and mutual bossiness (is that fair to say, mutual bossiness?) that these characters have for each other in the book.

EMMA APPROVED I MISS YOU SO MUCH PLEASE COME BACK.

(Nota bene: I have started rewatching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries as a substitute for Emma Approved. It’s interesting to rewatch it, having seen the new stuff they tried with Emma Approved. I’m watching one episode on a Monday and one on a Thursday, and it is great. I will still be really excited when Emma Approved comes back. Emma and Alex Knightley are adorable, and I want to see poor nervous Harriet find happiness.)

The post Emma Readalong!: Part One appeared first on Reading the End.

Best bookish thing that is not a book

To nobody’s surprise, Emma Approved. Are you watching it yet, or have you been holding off because you were burned by Welcome to Sanditon? If the latter, I’d like to take this opportunity to endorse Emma Approved with a full heart. Emma and Mr. Knightley have excellent chemistry; Sen. Elton is pleasingly personable but you can see how he will turn out to be secretly douchey; and as in most Emma adaptations, Harriet and Mr. Martin steal any scene they’re in together. This creative team is brilliant, and my wish is that they keep on doing video blog adaptations of 19th-century classics forever. The 19th century was a good time for Lit’rature. It’s not like they’d run out of ideas. Mainly I don’t want them to stop before they get around to Jane Eyre.

Best job by me of convincing my mother of an opinion of mine that she disagrees with and I have been trying to talk her around to my position for more than a decade now

This defense of Sirius Black. Mumsy still does not love him, but she conceded that I had a point, and that my point made her like him better than she used to. Hooray for me!

Most deserving of its hype

Eleanor and Park, Rainbow Rowell. The blogosphere could not stop talking about Eleanor and Park this year. Y’all were not lying. This book is damn amazing. I wanted to read it again the minute I finished it. I cannot wait to own my own copy, which I will cherish and put a book plate in with my name in my fanciest handwriting.

Most deserving of how m.f. excited I was about it before it came out

More Than This, by Patrick Ness. I went into A Monster Calls with too-high expectations, and when More Than This started off so slowly, I became terribly anxious that I wouldn’t love it the way Patrick Ness’s books deserve to be loved. But it rallied with the introduction of two new-and-wonderful characters, and I ended up loving it. In particular I love it that Patrick Ness is not in a rut. More Than This is totally different to the Chaos Walking series, which is totally different to The Crane Wife (review forthcoming), which is totally different to A Monster Calls. I love him, and I am excited for whatever he wants to do next.

Lowest expectations for a book that ended up being pretty good actually

Shadows, by Robin McKinley. As I’ve mentioned before, I count a couple of Robin McKinley’s books among my favorite books in the world. But only a couple, and the rest of her books leave me feeling dissatisfied and bored. My expectations of Shadows were rock-bottom, and it turned out to be a really fun read.

Most wanted to be The Secret History and was angry and disappointed when it wasn’t

You thought I was going to say The Goldfinch, didn’t you? Ha, ha, you were wrong. The answer is, The Bellwether Revivals, by Benjamin Wood. I did not like it. Why wasn’t it more like The Secret History? Why aren’t all books more like The Secret History? These are questions I cannot answer.

Loveliest surprise

You’ll be tired of me saying it, but Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye. I didn’t expect not to like it, but I was surprised by how much I ended up liking it. A runner-up, because I did expect not to like it, was Kate Atkinson’s strange and wonderful Life after Life.

Saddest fictional death

Uncle Finn in Tell the Wolves I’m Home, by Carol Rivka Brunt. That book wrecked me. Although it’s difficult to say in a year so packed with wonderful reads, I am going to go ahead and say that Tell the Wolves I’m Home was my best book of 2013. Eleanor and Park was awfully, awfully good, but I’m giving it to Tell the Wolves I’m Home by dint of the fact that it’s not getting quite as much play and thus needs me to love it extra.

Saddest real-life death

Elizabeth Peters, of course. I am crushed that Elizabeth Peters has died, and I regret that I never wrote her a letter to tell her how much enjoyment I got from her books over the years.

Made me feel the best about myself for enjoying it

HHhH, by Laurent Binet. I often struggle with books in translation, so I’m always thrilled — with the author and myself — to encounter a book in translation that I unreservedly love. HHhH is that kind of book. It is surprisingly lovely and sweet for a book about assassinating a Nazi officer.

Whack-a-doodlest book lent the most gravitas by its author’s serious, Southern-accented radio interviews

Going Clear, by Lawrence Wright – If you haven’t read this book about scientology yet, now’s a good time to read it. I think it would be fun to read over a vacation: lots of crazy parts that you can read out loud to your friends-and-relations, who can’t escape from you because y’all are on vacation.

Favorite term I coined myself like a genius

“Process dystopia” to describe the kind of book that shows the world all going to hell, instead of starting the book after the world has already gone to hell.

Coolest design

Obviously, Marisha Pessl’s Night Film. No contest, because I haven’t finished reading the JJ Abrams / Doug Dorst collaboration S yet.

Best execution of a tricky premise

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler. This book! So good! Karen Joy Fowler does not invent a premise and coast on it. She follows through all the way. She commits. I loved the writing, I loved the jokes, and I loved the sadness. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves gets additional credit for reminding me to care about James Tiptree Jr., an author I now really like.

Jolliest good fun

Lexicon, by Max Barry. This was just fun. It was fun and fun and fun, and there are not enough books in this world that are just pure fun.

Lovablest book that did not appeal to me on paper

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Nothing about the synopsis for this book would have called to me, but fortunately I read part of it in a NetGalley excerpts package and fell in love with the narrative voice. I loved it, and I think it’s something special and particular, and I’m not just saying that because the ending is perfectly geared towards my sensibilities.

Best Harry Potter news

It’s a tie! It’s a tie between the news that JK Rowling is writing a movie about Newt Scamander and his escapades as a wizard naturalist in the early twentieth century, and the news that the UK is releasing beautiful new editions of the Harry Potter books illustrated by Jim Kay of A Monster Calls. Y’all, I miss Harry Potter.

Most merits its long long length

Again, not The Goldfinch! (I think that could have been edited down a bit.) This one goes to Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s great. I didn’t want it to end.

Author least afraid of going balls-to-the-wall crazy with plots

Laini Taylor! I am well excited for the third book in her Nouns of Substances and Atmospheric Nouns trilogy. She just goes all out with her storylines, and that is wonderful to me, as anyone who has ever heard me speak about The Vampire Diaries will know.

Best character

Boris, from Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. There aren’t enough good things to say about Boris. If the book only consisted of passages with Boris in them, and had no other plot, it would be worth it just for that. I don’t remember the last time I encountered a character in a book that I enjoyed spending time with as much as Boris from The Goldfinch.

Insanest that I still haven’t finished reading it

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman. I know I know I know I know. But here’s what’s up: I’m reading it to Social Sister. I’ll finish reading it when I finish reading it to Social Sister. That’s how we roll.

And that’s 2013, my friends! I’ll be away from blogging over the next couple of weeks to celebrate holidays with the family, and I wish you all happy holidays and a wonderful New Year. See you in January!

The post The superlatives of an outstanding reading year appeared first on Reading the End.

Meanwhile, I became obsessed with the weird and wonderful podcast Welcome to Night Vale. If you are not familiar with it, I urge you to become familiar with it. The elevator pitch is that it’s what Prairie Home Companion would be if it were also The Twilight Zone: a community radio program for a town called Night Vale where all conspiracy theories are true. If you read a little bit about Welcome to Night Vale, you will find that the internet is adorably in love with the relationship between the program’s narrator, Cecil, and the beautiful scientist, Carlos, who comes to Night Vale to figure out what is going on with it. The internet has accordingly settled down to make as many pieces of Tumblr fan art of Cecil and Carlos cuddling as one internet can produce.

These two things together started me thinking about fandom and entitlement and art, and how much better it is to be joyful about a piece of art than angry with it. It would be difficult to overstate how charming I find it when the internet falls in love with something, be it a mission to cheer up Keanu Reeves, a transmedia web series adaptation of Jane Austen, or a queer relationship that is the most normal thing about the weirdest podcast in the land. The capacity for collective joy that the internet offers is one of my favorite things about the modern world; which I suppose is why it bums me out so much when (factions of) fandoms forget about joy and get bogged down in griping.

I’m not suggesting that fandoms, or factions of fandoms, should be prohibited from criticizing the things they are fans of. Quite the contrary. Close readings of anything make my dorky English major heart skip a happy beat. It is worthwhile to mind, and to say that you mind, when Disney releases yet another damn movie about white princesses, even if you do end up enjoying it. It’s worthwhile to worry about the visibility, or lack thereof, of particular demographics who don’t get represented enough in our media. I don’t worry about arguing for change.

I worry about this tendency to argue for stasis as if we are entitled to have everything we love stick around forever and never, ever, ever change. I get why people do it; I do it myself. When I fall in love with something, I want more of that thing. I want the enormous Harry Potter encyclopedia of which JK Rowling has several times spoken. I want the team behind Emma Approved to never stop making web series adaptations of classic novels by women. But actually, much more than I want infinity more of the same thing I loved before, I want creators of art to have the freedom to make art that lights them up, even knowing that what excites them may bore me, even knowing that some of their attempts will fail and I will be disappointed. I want them to be able to make the art that matches their vision. My vision of what their art should be is irrelevant.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t say, for instance, Boo. A Casual Vacancy was tedious and miserable. But I’ll try to remember not to say, Boo. A Casual Vacancy bore an insufficient resemblance to the Harry Potter books. A Casual Vacancy is nothing to do with my experience of the Harry Potter books. JK Rowling made the Harry Potter books, and I super super loved them and they shaped my whole adolescence. The correct response to that is not, I deserve more of this, but rather, lucky me.

My conclusion from all this thinking turned out to be very small and obvious: Given that you are not owed art in the first place (art is only ever a gift), it is silly and mean to fuss at the artist for failing to conform to your expectations. I want fandoms (including myself) not to forget the feeling of Lucky me; and especially lucky me when it’s something indie and strange like Welcome to Night Vale or Emma Approved, where it really is tremendously lucky that so many people — for love, not for money — have devoted their time and energy to making this thing we love. I want gratitude to have a place at the table.

The post Thoughts on fandoms appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 5

Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We will appreciate it very very much).

If you want to skip around, here are the contents of the podcast:

Starting at 1:56: Sad news. We are all sad to have lost Barbara Mertz, aka Barbara Michaels, aka Elizabeth Peters. She died on 8 August, and I was crushed. The Amelia Peabody series is one of my favorite series of books in all the land.

Starting at 3:22: The announcement of the new webseries by Bernie Su and Hank Green enchants us! The series will be an adaptation of Emma called Emma Approved, with a premiere date TBD. Here is where Bernie Su answers some questions about Emma Approved, if you are interested. We discuss some pitfalls of adapting Emma and rave about the best Emma adaptation to date, Clueless.

Starting at 9:01: We had a listener question, hooray! What is one school reading book you have never read? We answer this and then get into the question of assigned reading and how we feel about it. For this segment we have with us Special Guest Star and Producer Randon. Note that Whiskey Jenny and I are generally in favor of assigned reading on account of how we are great big nerds.

Starting at 14:12: I swear to God this is a thing! Someone find this for me! Googling made it hard because it brought up all stuff like Treasure Island. I READ THIS STORY SOMEWHERE AND I AM CONFIDENT IT IS TRUE. Children would not become insane monsters if shipwrecked on an island. Hush up William Golding.

Starting at 31:55: Whiskey Jenny and I discuss Snow Falling on Cedars, the book we both read for this podcast.

36:32 – 38:58 and 48:32 – 45:00: Spoilery sections of the Snow Falling on Cedars discussion! I tried to avoid them but in the end I could not.

Starting at 45:01: We recommend a book for next time! We cannot wait to talk about it!

Starting at 51:55: Closing remarks and outro.

Credits
Photo credit: andreybl / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Song is by Jeff MacDougall and comes from here.
The above links to books we’ve discussed are affiliate links. If you click on them and then buy a book from that website, I get a very small amount of money. This in no way influences my reviews.

The post Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.5: Elizabeth Peters, Emma Approved, Summer Reading, and Snow Falling on Cedars appeared first on Reading the End.