pride and prejudice

BOOKENDS: What I Read in June 2024

- Meg

I feel like June was a decent reading month. It started off slow because I did not enjoy The Warm Hands of Ghosts as much as I thought it would which was disappointing because I adored her Winternight Trilogy, and it put me in a reading slump that lasted until about the last week and a half of June where I read/finished up the rest of these. I listened to Pride and Prejudice narrated by Rosamund Pike on a trip to visit my mom, and I loved revisiting that familiar story this way. I devoured Yellowface in a single sitting while waiting for an oil change, and I kicked myself a bit for putting it off for so long. I enjoy Kuang’s writing so much. The historical romance was solid, and I’ll definitely be checking out more of her writing in the future. I want to read all of the Best American SFF, and I reread 2015’s edition and thought the entries were solid still after almost a decade! The Amazon Original Stories are great for me at getting out of reading slumps too because they’re short and I can usually read one or two in a sitting, so that helps get me out of a slump and get my reads for the year number up, especially when I feel like I’ve been slacking a bit.

WHAT I READ

💖 purchased/owned | 🌠 library/borrowed | 🔮 review copy | 💞 reread | 👻 dnf

🌠 The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden
💖 Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
💖 The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, ed. Joe Hill
🌠 The Long Game, by Ann Leckie (Kindle Unlimited)
🌠 Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach, by Nnedi Okorafor (Kindle Unlimited)
💖 Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang
🌠 Slow Time Between the Stars, by John Scazi (Kindle Unlimited)
💖 Dreaming of a Duke Like You, by Sara Bennett

The Delicate Art of No; Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

- Meg

fbmreview

The Delicate Art of No; Pride and Prejudice by Jane AustenTitle: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Published by Penguin, Penguin Drop Caps
Published: December 12th 2012
Genres: Fiction, Classics
Pages: 416
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

A is for Austen. Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth’s early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy is a prejudice only matched by the folly of his arrogant pride. Their first impressions give way to true feelings in a comedy profoundly concerned with happiness and how it might be achieved.

You must give me leave to judge for myself, and pay me the compliment of believing what I say.

As a forewarning, this review of Pride and Prejudice will be entirely personal in nature, meaning I’ll be referencing the book’s plot and its parallels to something that recently happened to me.

This is one of my favorite books of all time, and I tend to reread it once every year or so because reading it makes me happy. This year, I read it right in the midst of all of the Valentine’s Day marketing and goopy, lovey stuff. I don’t particularly read much in the “romance” genre, and Jane Austen is about as traditionally romance-y as I get. Every time I’ve reread Pride and Prejudice, it resonates so much more with me because Austen can paint with such skill these true-to-life renditions in her cast of characters, and because two hundred years later, people like Jane Bennet, Caroline Bingley, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, and Mr. Collins still exist.

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