Happy Anniversary

I don't mean to sound smug, but I'm really impressed with my sense of timing right now. It is really quite something.

In my post from two weeks ago I discussed re-reading all of Jane Austen's novels last summer because she is my favorite author. Shortly after writing that I discovered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which became the subject of last week's post. After getting caught up with the Lizzie Bennet Diaries I felt a very strong pull to re-read Pride and Prejudice because I just wasn't getting enough Mr. Darcy in the series, so I did.

I finished Pride and Prejudice on Sunday. The remarkable thing isn't that I read my favorite book in six days, but that Pride and Prejudice was published 200 years ago Monday and I'd had no idea such a big anniversary was coming up when I decided to read the book in six days. I found out about the anniversary shortly after I woke up on Monday (who says you can't learn anything on Twitter?) and I would've dropped everything and started reading Pride and Prejudice in celebration of the anniversary if I hadn't just finished it the day before. See, timing.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the British Library for tweeting a link to this delightful article about Pride and Prejudice's 200th anniversary on Monday morning. I highly recommend it.

How Did I Miss This?

In last week's non-YA book recommendation post I mentioned my love of Jane Austen novels and briefly noted that Pride and Prejudice is my favorite. That being said, I am horrified that I only discovered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries last week, especially because the series was created by Hank Green, brother of my new favorite YA author, John Green.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, as I just implied, is a Web series and an updated re-telling of Pride and Prejudice. Lizzie Bennet in the series is a grad student studying mass communications who started a video blog as part of her thesis project. She has two sisters, Jane and Lydia, an overbearing (and apparently Southern) mother, and a father who is pretty hands-off. Her video blog is in the confessional, girl-sitting-in-front-of-her-computer-in-her-bedroom style even though her best friend Charlotte Lu, a wannabe filmmaker, films and edits them.

Lizzie's video blog might have been pretty boring if a rich med student named Bing Lee hadn't bought a house in the neighborhood just before she started it.

Lizzie isn't the only character we've seen, though. There's been quite a lot of her sisters, Jane and Lydia (in the series Mary Bennet is their cousin and Kitty Bennet is Lydia's pet cat - how cute is that?), and Charlotte Lu (Charlotte Lucas in the book). We've also seen Bing Lee (Charles Bingley in the book), Caroline Lee (Caroline Bingley in the book), George Wickham, Ricky Collins (William Collins in the book), Fitz Williams (Colonel Fitzwilliam in the book), Gigi Darcy (Georgiana Darcy in the book), and, of course, William Darcy (Fitzwilliam Darcy in the book). Other characters mentioned but not seen are Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and (Lady) Catherine de Bourgh.

As someone who has read Pride and Prejudice at least six times and watched the Keira Knightley movie more times than I can count, I really love seeing how the writers update the story. For instance, Mr. Collins is no longer a clergyman, but is now a guy with a start-up Web video company. And Catherine de Bourgh is the venture capitalist who is the primary backer of his venture. Furthermore, the major characters all have online lives complete with Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. (In fact, I discovered the Lizzie Bennet Diaries through Tumblr.) I haven't become immersed enough in the story to follow any of the characters on Twitter (yet), but I have seen a few tweets and it's enough to tell me that Twitter is used to expand the story rather than just promote the series.

I watched every episode of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries in the last week and now I am all caught up. The downside of that, though, is that I have to wait for the next episode. The episodes are no more than six minutes long, which allowed me to watch a lot of them in one sitting, but I won't be able to do that with new episodes any more. All things considered, though, I'm glad I'm caught up. And even more glad that I discovered this gem of a Web series.

Book Recommendations: Not YA Edition

What do you call books that aren't YA books? I don't like calling them "adult" books because that seems to imply that the books in question are x-rated. Trust me, I'm not recommending Fifty Shades of Grey. I actually read Fifty Shades of Grey last year, too, but I would never recommend it to anyone because it's terrible; it's poorly written and has a boring narrator. In other words, it reads like the erotic Twilight fan fiction it started out as. But I digress wildly; the point of this post is to recommend books not tear them down.

• Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - I decided to lump these together so I wouldn't end up writing six bullet points about my love for Jane Austen. I normally re-read an Austen novel or two every year, but last year I decided to read all six completed novels over the summer. It was a good decision. I've listed them here in the order in which I rank them, but I suggest you read or re-read them all and come up with your own ranking. Austen's novels are also incredibly popular fodder for adaptations; I've seen great (and at least one terrible) movies of each of these books.
• All Roads Lead to Austen: A Yearlong Journey with Jane by Amy Elizabeth Smith - I used this book to put a bow on my Austen re-reading. Smith decided to take a sabbatical from her position as a university professor to travel through South America, holding impromptu Jane Austen reading groups in each country she visited. Part travelogue, part literary discussion - this book is a great read. I ended up reading it in two days. I think it helps to be familiar with the Austen novels Smith discussed with her groups (Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice), but it's not necessary; my mom also enjoyed this book and she isn't a Janeite.
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - I read this book for my YA class, but I'm including it here because it was never marketed as a YA book. When I finished this book (at 2 in the morning, mind you) I wrote a Facebook message to my old roommate who'd lent it to me that simply said, "The Book Thief. Holy crap." Frankly, I'm disappointed that it took me so long to read it (it was released in 2007). It took a little while for me to get used to the narrator's voice (in my defense, Death is kind of a strange narrator), but once I got the hang of it I was mesmerized by the story. So thanks, old roommate, for lending me this book :)

I also enjoyed Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner. Somehow I'm always a year or two behind when reading Weiner's novels even though she's one of my favorite authors.

Book Recommendations: YA Edition

I'm finally getting around to some of my promised book recommendations. I read so many good books in 2012 that I have to split my recommendations up between YA and not YA. I read each of the below books for my YA literature course. I think only one of them was actually published in 2012, but they were all new to me. They're listed in the order in which I read them.

• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - This was the first book I read for the course and it set a really high bar for the 23 books that came after it. This book found its way to a lot of "best of the year" lists and deservedly so. Teenagers Hazel and Augustus meet at a support group for young cancer patients and fall in love. You'll laugh (yes, really), you'll cry, you'll be glad you read it. I also fully intend to read everything else John Green has ever written.
• Princess Academy by Shannon Hale - I've read Hale's first not YA book, Austenland, several times, so I decided to check out one of her YA books for the course. I'm glad I chose this one. Miri is a fourteen-year-old girl who doesn't know where she fits in her village until she and the rest of the village girls are forced to attend a so-called princess academy. It's a sweet story with a happy ending and sometimes that's all you want from a good book.
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick - I'd seen the movie Hugo in the theater, so I had a pretty good idea of the story. But I was completely unprepared for the way Selznick tells the story in the book. There's a visual aspect to the storytelling that is unlike anything I'd ever seen before and is incredibly compelling. I'd probably recommend this book on that alone, but the story is also very good.
• The Giver by Lois Lowry - I was so entranced by this story that I read the book in one day (practically one sitting). Apparently this book is often assigned in high school, but it wasn't in mine. And more's the pity. This is a deceptively simple story about a deceptively perfect world and it stayed with me long after I finished it.
• Amy & Roger's Epic Detour by Morgan Matson - Of the 52 books I read last year, this is the one most likely to be slapped with the dreaded "chick lit" label. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I don't mind reading chick lit any more than I mind watching chick flicks or listening to emo. I do wish we could strip the pejorative connotation from "chick lit," though (and "chick flicks" and "emo," for that matter). The odds that I will re-read this book someday are high, which is one of the highest forms of praise I can give a book.
• Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson - This historical novel is set during the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in 1793. This is a really good, fast-paced story, but I'm also recommending it because I feel like this is an episode in early American history that isn't well-known. I'd never heard of it until I read this book and I'm a native of the Delaware Valley; heck, I was in middle school during the 200th anniversary, it should at least have been mentioned in passing. The author blurb on the book states that Anderson first became aware of the outbreak when she saw something about the anniversary on the Philly local news, but she must have been watching PBS or something (we got all of our news from 6ABC).

I also really enjoyed Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire and Mockingjay.

Happy New Year

I know, another post without my promised book recommendations. I really will get around to posting them, just not today. It's not a lack of material (in fact, I read what amounted to a book a week last year) but a lack of time right now.

I made a New Year's Resolution to blog (at least) once a week. I decided I would post on Wednesdays (hence this post). But it looks like I will have to start earlier than 11:30 PM in the future. As much as I would like to recommend some of the many fantastic books I read last year to you, I'd like to go to bed at a somewhat decent hour more :)