On Books: Including For Men At Some Time What Is The American Version Of Jane Austen

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Let's start with the latest library book I've read:

Peter Haining - The Great English Earthquake

Did you know there was a violent earthquake in England in 1884 with Essex as it's epicentre? Well  didn't. How a book about an earthquake in England during the Victorian era reached a small library in South Wales I don't know. But there we go.

Historians and Seismologists will love this book. Mr Haining knows his Essex earthquakes and the research he's done clearly shows this. However for the general reader (of which I'm unquestionably one) account after account of the ground shaking and damage to buildings can be wearisome after a while.

Still if you're into earthquakes and especially Essex earthquakes this is the book for you.

So a couple of days ago I was looking through the hard drive of the DVR (dominated by programmes the wife records now for me it's just Pobol Y Cwm and Bones generally speaking) when I noticed a film she'd recorded in late December when I was away in Essex exile looking after my unwell mother.

" I see you recorded Little Women" I said

"What of it?"

"Well I'm reading it right now".

And for the first time ever when I mentioned to the wife what book I'm reading she actually gasped.

My attitude to Louisa M Alcott's classic novel was exactly that to whatever Jane Austen tome you'd care to mention. As a boy/teenager/in my twenties I avoided it as it was "for girls". When I got older it was a case of so many books so little time...until now.

Let's start by saying that a fifty four year old man is not the target audience for this. But given it's classic status any true reader does need to say that they've read it.

Apparently Little Women was originally two books before merged into the one we know today. This did not surprise me. For (talking about the completed package) if football is described as a game of two halves then so is this novel. I can't remember another book where there seems to be a radical and sudden difference between it's first and second half. If there was one reason why I couldn't say I liked Little Women it was that.

The first part was very homespun American. And the thing is, nothing much really happened. It was a dull read. Indeed it was a shame that it wasn't set in the American South because with the general storyline (the lives of a group of women living in genteel poverty) I couldn't help thinking of cliched Country and Western tunes. The type that work along the lines of "We were poor and living in a cardboard box in Nashville....but we were happy" (not that poor mind you,they have a servant).

But it seemed as if Ms Alcott realised this because in the second half everything that she could have put in such a book seemed to be thrown in all of a sudden. So I disliked it for a different reason. That things happening so quickly in relation to the first part beggared belief.

But yet again it wasn't aimed at me. Mind you I've read Caitlin Moran and Marian Keyes and have enjoyed them as well. So perhaps it was just the case that Ms Alcott knew her audience and was happy enough with that.

Perhaps. Who can tell?

And in the random way I pick books from the Kindle the next ebook turns out to be Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. As I've said before in this blog my view of her is that she's in that group of writers I call "Literary Switzerland". In that I don't dislike them but I can't understand why they're considered great. A position that always bothered me because I feel I've missed something.

My Kindle has a mind of it's own.

Until the next time.