Jinjer 31: Books, Books, and More Books

[cascarones]

@Lurky so true! Now I'm curious which Austen heroine each Duggar girl aligns best with! I'll have to think on my answers, but I'd love to see everyone else's thoughts. 

[Greendoor]

Safe to bet there is neither an Elizabeth or Lydia.  

They all aspire to be Jane; there are no doubt several Mary's and Kitty's.

 

[singsingsing]

29 minutes ago, cascarones said:

@Lurky so true! Now I'm curious which Austen heroine each Duggar girl aligns best with! I'll have to think on my answers, but I'd love to see everyone else's thoughts. 

OH BOY. Okay, here's what I'm going with...

Jana - Anne Elliot. Quiet, reserved, kind, taken for granted and taken advantage of by her family. Still unmarried at the DANGEROUS age of 27!

Jill - Lydia Bennet*. Silly, assertive (with her sisters when they were all living at home), extremely pleased with herself after diving into marriage, but her husband is a complete loser, and always begging for money. (Obviously Lydia's scandalous elopement doesn't factor in here)

Jessa - Emma Woodhouse. Beautiful, confident, likes to play matchmaker, likes to be in control, but has no particular talents.

Jinger - Jane Fairfax*. Somewhat artistic and talented, beautiful but reserved, and pushed around by others. Falls for an intelligent and charismatic but shallow man.

Joy - Catherine Morland. Young, naive, idealistic, a follower. (I almost chose her for Jinger till I remembered the part about her rolling down hills and thought she seemed more Joy)

*I know these two aren't heroines, but I didn't feel like Jill or Jinger aligned with either Elizabeth Bennet or Elinor Dashwood!

[calimojo]

well done and kudos for spelling Elinor correctly.

Who is Anna Duggar?  Harriet Smith maybe? 

And is Derick Mr Elton or Mr Collins? 

And Cousin Amy could be a good Lydia as well. 

And I don't see a Darcy anywhere in sight

 

[SapphireSlytherin]

@singsingsing and @calimojo y’all are making me want to try those books again. When I should be studying very dry, boring, and sadly necessary books in advance of a certification exam. Lol

[singsingsing]

I just realized I forgot Fanny Price. Somewhat surprisingly, none of them really strike me as Fanny Price, either.

[FleeJanaFree]

Jill is totally a Lydia!

[Hashtag Blessed]

@singsingsing Well holy shit, I don't think it gets any more perfect than that. I agree totally, but I thought maybe Jinger might be Marianne Dashwood because baaaaaabe and clingyness. Or maybe Kitty Bennet following around in the wake of her sister's more dominant personality. But I like your assessment. Well done you.

 

[Seahorse Wrangler]

I just got my biennial e-mail

Quote

As an Anglophone, please recommend books in English for grades Sec 1-5(7-11) . Must be easy to read since English is the second language.

Every 2 years my lists get rejected because even Sir Pterry's Tiffany Aching or Bromliad are considered too hard. However every year I end up loaning my children's friends piles of books because they find the recommended books to be either too easy or the condensed versions.

Needless to say I'm always in trouble because the system deems the books to be too advanced.

 

Seafilly1 had to read  'Le Comte de Monte Cristo' in sec 5. Half her class failed because the language was too archaic.

[trustworthy]

Michael Bates is Fanny Price.

[feministxtian]

All of y'all with such deep tastes in books...My fiction collection runs to Clancy, Cussler, Pratchett, McCaffery, Bova and the few "classics" like Brave New World, 1984, The Time Machine, The Handmaid's Tale and Fahrenheit 451. My non-fiction is utterly geek. Astronaut biographies and autobiographies, LOVED LOVED LOVED Hidden Figures, The Strange Life of Henrietta Lacks (EXCELLENT), and light reading like Truth, Lies and O-Rings about the Challenger accident. I also downloaded and read the Columbia Accident Inquiry Board (CAIB) report (yes, the WHOLE thing), some great non-fiction free downloads of the early space program. 

I hated Shakespeare with a bloody passion, detested the "classics" I had to read in high school (Lord of the Flies, Antigone, Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, The Oxbow Incident, and heaven knows what else) I read as little as possible of them to get by. At one time I had a collection of all the Star Trek novels, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Alien Nation and The 4400. My Netflix playlist runs to documentaries, there's a great one that was done by a friend of mine about the guys in Mission Control, the unsung heroes. My Youtube is the same. 

I'm just a geek...and not into the classics...they bored the crap out of me. 

[NakedKnees]

Creative Writing was one of my majors in University, and I'm now super nervous about how my grammar will turn out in this post  

I really liked the way my program assigned books to read: they needed to be successful both critically and commercially. We still had to read "stuffy" classics for other English classes, but I liked that distinction for the Creative Writing major. I think it makes sense. We got to read books like American Gods and White Teeth.

I've accidentally gotten more into reading "stuffy" classics ever since I started reading books in my second language. I'm so happy to finally be breaking down that barrier, but it's so challenging and non-relaxing that the English-language classics I've put off reading now feel a lot breezier to get through. 

Some classics I loved:

• Any of the big dystopians (1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, etc.)
• Anything Virginia Woolf. I've read them all. Yes, I know, it's weird.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• Things Fall Apart (is that a classic yet? It should be)
• The Sun Also Rises
• I just read The Jungle so it might be too fresh but I really enjoyed it.

Some classics I didn't like that much:

• Pride and Prejudice
• Catch-22
• Anything Shakespeare that doesn't have lots of fairies or magic. Sorry.
• The Great Gatsby
• Moby Dick. I barely started it, but damn that's dry.

[Bethella]

6 hours ago, calimojo said:

Who is Anna Duggar?  Harriet Smith maybe? 

I think Anna is Charlotte Lucas. She married for the sake of not being a spinster and is willing to put up with anything from her husband.

Quote

happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance…It is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.

[LacyMay]

21 hours ago, SeekingAdventure said:

@LacyMay I think we have a similar taste in books. I love Jodie Picoult and Diane Chamberlain. I got into Jodie Picoult while being in Canada and Diane Chamberlain in South America. Very random.. Do the other three authors write in a similar way?

I'm always weary of recommending books and authors. But I think that if you enjoy Jodie Picoult and Diane Chamberlain you might have good luck with Amy Hatvany and Rosalind Noonan they don't necessarily have the dramatic twists that the other ones do but I still find they do the personal family drama well. Amy Hatvany in particular has touched on some relevant issues (alcoholism in women, acquaintance rape) I would also say Kimberly Mcreight would be a good bet. 

Chevy Stevens does a lot more thriller/mystery but she sets her books on and around Vancouver island and I have a soft spot for books with familiar settings. Lisa Scottoline is fairly drama mystery as well but not as gritty as Chevy. 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

 

19 hours ago, tabitha2 said:

Have any if y'all ever read or familiar with The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu? Such a facinating beautiful If complex and long  book! This is the worlds first novel.  Shikibu was a noblewomen in the service of the Empress Shoshone of Japan in the 10th century and she wrote it to entertain her mistress.   This was a time of no war on Japan when music , elegant writing and learning was prized above all else. 

We know next to nothing of the Lady herself not even her real name or when she died only that the book stops almost in mid sentence. Very intriguing. 

Yes! That's a really fascinating story but also very hard to understand without commentaries. Enchi Fumiko, herself a writer and a scholar, translated it into modern Japanese and wrote extensively about it. Her book "Onnamen" draws a lot from the Genji Monogatari.

I find incredibly fascinating that in a culture that didn't exactly distinguish itself for the preeminent roles given to women, the first important literary work that influenced every literary work after was written by a woman. But totally understandable since men at the time wrote in Chinese, the scholars language. It is as if the Divina Commedia (the equivalent work in my culture, written in vulgar florentine when every thing that mattered was written in latin) were written by an unnamed lady whose true identity is very debated.

Truly worth a reading.

[victoriasponge]

12 hours ago, ElToro said:

Mind you, there's also a whole load of boring shit about a bunch of vicars. You just have to skip those parts!

That's the bit I remember! I think it was partly that I wasn't given enough time to read it (same with Great Expectations) which made stories/writing I already struggled with just dull and a pain.

As for texts I love

• Jane Eyre
• The Great Gatsby
• Much Ado About Nothing (the only Shakespeare that will ever make this list)
• Fantomina
• The Famous Five series
• My Sister's Keeper
• The Handmaid's Tale
• Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Twits etc. etc. etc.
• 1984
• Brave New World
• The 'I Heart...' series for all my chick-lit needs
• Chronicles of Narnia
• The Harry Potter series

And texts/authors I hated

• Austen
• Dickens
• Virtually all Shakespeare
• Dracula
• Frankenstein
• Keats
• Hemingway
• Waiting for Godot
• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Far From the Madding Crowd

[KnittingOwl]

19 hours ago, JillyO said:

I'm another one who just can't be bothered with classics much. I read quite a lot of the classics mentioned here, many of them in high-school English class. Seeing as I'm German, I read even more German classics (Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Fontane, Brecht, ETA Hoffmann, Mann, Kafka, Lessing, etc.). I also read some French classics in French class (Voltaire's Candide, Satre's Le Mur and Camus' L'Étranger come to mind).

I'd love to be able to read some things in the original language.  I've forgotten a lot of French from high school and college, so I'm trying to pick it up again slowly.  I just bought the Little Prince in French and figure that's a good start.

5 hours ago, feministxtian said:

All of y'all with such deep tastes in books...My fiction collection runs to Clancy, Cussler, Pratchett, McCaffery, Bova and the few "classics" like Brave New World, 1984, The Time Machine, The Handmaid's Tale and Fahrenheit 451. My non-fiction is utterly geek. Astronaut biographies and autobiographies, LOVED LOVED LOVED Hidden Figures, The Strange Life of Henrietta Lacks (EXCELLENT), and light reading like Truth, Lies and O-Rings about the Challenger accident. I also downloaded and read the Columbia Accident Inquiry Board (CAIB) report (yes, the WHOLE thing), some great non-fiction free downloads of the early space program.

I'm just a geek...and not into the classics...they bored the crap out of me. 

I think we could share book lists.

I'm also not super into the Classics, although I also consider books like Brave New World and 1984 to be classics, too.  I read a lot of older scifi and fantasy.  Lots of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and Neal Stephenson.  I think my favorite books are American Gods and Cryptonomicon.  

[laPapessaGiovanna]

17 hours ago, nausicaa said:

As @veron1que said, there is a lot to learn by challenging yourself with a book that isn't as immediately accessible in terms of structure, language, or culture. Also, depending on your goals, knowing the canon helps to understand references and larger cultural trends in literature. 

Reading can be used to be fun and relaxing, but that's not everyone's goal all the time with reading. Nor should it be.

I agree to a degree. It must always be a free choice imho.

Reading a book for me is like entering in a relationship, it may be a deep and personal one or a we're just acquaintances one. Nobody can mandate you enter in a deep personal relationship, but you can be under obligation to maintain an acquaintances level relationship with many people.

Same with books. Imho books can be only suggested not mandated and if you mandate a reading you can't expect more than a casual acquaintances relationship. It can evolve in something deeper with time and knowledge or it may never happen.

I appreciated my anthropology course professor way to deal with mandated reading. He gave us a list of more than 20 books, all of them challenging in different ways among which we could choose. That list shocked me because I hadn't read nor heard of anyone of them before and that's quite unusual for me. Even more unusual was that the bookshop owner asked me who compiled the list because it was so particular (big city bookshp, I hadn't even bothered with my town's one). I fell in love with many of those books but under no pressure to hook up with one in particular.

I think this is a big problem with classics. There's usually One book, The Book. You feel under pressure to fell in love with it cos it's SO speshul and if you don't like it, well it's your fault cos you're clearly the lacking one. That's bullshit.

[singsingsing]

This is just reminding me of how much I want to read. I was a total bookworm as a child, but that tapered off through my teens, and by university I was reading 7 or 8 books a year if I was lucky. I think the sheer amount of reading I had to do for my classes made me just... not want to read when I had free time.

I set myself a goal of reading 50 books this year, and I'm like 12 behind.  Still, a major improvement! Sometime in my teens I started becoming incredibly judgemental of books. If I thought the writing was kind of crummy, or one of the characters really bothered me, or I was uncomfortable with some of the author's apparent attitudes/opinions, I just couldn't stand it. It bothered me on a visceral level. I'm really striving to get over that now, because I'm missing out on a lot of reading - plus I'm trying to be less judgemental in general, and reading things that make me annoyed or uncomfortable is a good step in that direction, I think.

So I'm going to get a library card. I'm embarrassed to say that I have not had a library card since I was a child. I don't know why it's only now dawning on me how amazing it is that I have access to thousands of books FOR FREE! Like I know this world is kind of crazy and awful at times, but that's something to celebrate! Slightly worried I have like $4000 in unpaid fines from when I was 10, but hey!

[Swamptribe]

Love Love books.  Go through about one a week.  Sometimes re-reading old favorites.  Had to cut down from reading more because of budgeting:). Prachett, Bova, Gaiman, Clark Asimov....(yes, I tend to sci-fi) soooo many wonderful authors, so little time. I like to read mainly fiction, but work in some non-fiction now and then. 

Hubs and I share books.  I read them first because I read faster.  He reads them after.  Poor guy has a lot of catching up to do. We haunt the local thrift shops for our books.  Right now I'm finally reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz".  Last week finished the first Tim Dorsey novel.

 

[SamiKatz]

1 hour ago, singsingsing said:

So I'm going to get a library card. I'm embarrassed to say that I have not had a library card since I was a child. I don't know why it's only now dawning on me how amazing it is that I have access to thousands of books FOR FREE! Like I know this world is kind of crazy and awful at times, but that's something to celebrate! Slightly worried I have like $4000 in unpaid fines from when I was 10, but hey!

I'm going to renew my library card, 'cause I saw the library at the civic centre in the suburb I live in and it's such an amazing building, I thought "I should renew my library card so I can come here and read books", shallow, but good too.

Classic novel I.Did.Not.Like.At.All - Catcher in They Rye

I also absolutely love Carl Hiaasen's books.  Definitely not classics but good reads and so funny.  I recommend him to everyone.  Is there a thread specifically for books?  If not, there should be, I love talking about books.

 

[Lurker]

I love the library.  I actually have cards to three different systems. I read constantly and having the ability to download ebooks of all genres keeps me content.   I am a lover of popular fiction, mostly romance, cozy mysteries and romantic fantasy/SF.

I no longer have the patience to struggle through books that are considered classic or worthy, but I read my share when I was younger.  The only ones I will reread now are Jane Austen.

[singsingsing]

Catcher in the Rye seems to be the one everyone hates. I read it when I was about 16 and loved it. I really identified with Holden, like a lot of teenagers do, but more so I think because I also just up and quit school. I refuse to re-read it because I'm worried that as an adult I'll hate it, and I want to hold onto my good memories of it instead. 

[Bad Wolf]

About 60 years ago the BBC used to serialize the classics on children's TV. 13 episodes on Sundays. That was my first introduction to Dickens. Since then I've read a lot of his books. I don't own as many books as I used to because of Kindle and library downloads.

Some of the books people have listed here as classics, I consider almost contemporary.  (Tolkien et al) Can't wait for Harry Potter to be considered a classic. It will come.

And yes, I am that old. 

[louisa05]

For all the Shakespeare haters, he wrote plays. They weren't meant to be read from a page. Too many teachers don't let students interact with the text enough or really absorb that it is not intended to be read silently. When I taught Romeo & Juliet to 9th graders, we acted it out in class. I had plastic swords for the fights. We blocked scenes, designed costumes, drew scenery and watched film versions. 

When I taught Shakespeare to seniors, we read it aloud, designed costumes and sets, blocked scenes, made mock casts, listened to scenes on audio versions, proposed soundtracks, watched various scenes in different filmed versions and compared them. 

I still see former students at the local Shakespeare festival every year.