#63 - Persuasion

Thank goodness the reader's block is over. I didn't know what to do with myself not being able to blog about the books that I've read because I hadn't actually finished a book in about five weeks. The dry spell is over! Over my two plane rides (to Vancouver and back again) I managed to finish Jane Austen's Persuasion, the inaugural choice of our newly formed 1001 Books To Read Before You Die club at work.

Persuasion is yet another classic that reminds me that I can't believe I haven't enjoyed the talents of Jane Austen in my life before now. It's the story of Anne Elliot, the middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain, pompous, yet totally harmless man, who finds herself marginalized by her family, left out in the cold by love, and saddled with the fact that she's morally superior to many of her relations. Anne overcomes her trials (of course) and eventually finds happiness. The persuasion part of the novel comes in many forms: Anne's betrayal of her heart when she refuses the proposal of Captain Wentworth on the bidding of her great friend and mother stand-in, Lady Russell; Wentworth's upwardly mobile abilities regarding his own social standing throughout the novel; and Anne's in-between position in terms of her meddling, hypochondriac sister and her many other frustrating relations.

The most shocking aspect to reading Jane Austen at this point in my life is how she crafted completely and utterly addictive books, and Persuasion is no exception. It's an early 19th-century page turner, and I'm not really why that surprises me, but it really does.

Plus, the more of Austen I read, the more I find that she's so responsible for many of the tropes and/or plot devices that we find in modern-day chicklit novels, the charming cad, the mistaken affection and/or personality assumptions, the awkward parental units, the unsatisfying love lives, and then I feel dumb that it's taken me this long to get with the, ahem, program.