"The Annotated Persuasion" by Jane Austen (annotated and edited by David M. Shapard)

Do you ever love a book so much that you draw the last few chapters out as long as you possibly can?

It took me almost a week to read the last three chapters of Persuasion this time.  They were such exquisite joy, and yet so cozy and comforting, that I simply had to revel in and savor them as long as possible.  Finally, finally, finally things went well for the patient and persevering Anne Elliot.  So satisfying!  So heartwarming!

And I love that Persuasion is the first book I finished reading in the new year.  This book is full of new beginnings and hope for the future.  It should go into rotation as a first-of-the-year book for me on a regular basis.

The annotations by David M. Shapard were once again a continual delight.  I will never remember even a tenth of what I learned while reading all six of these annotated Austen books over the past twelve months... but that's okay!  I will remember some of it, and I can always read them again one day.  There's enough information in these to make reading them equal to taking a whole college course on Austen, I think.  They aren't fast reads, but they are worthwhile.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G for the original text and PG-13 for the annotations, which sometimes delve into modern vs. 1800s notions about sexual purity and so on.

"The Annotated Mansfield Park" by Jane Austen (Annotated and Edited by David M. Shapar)

You know what?  I really liked Mansfield Park this time through :-o  The first time I read it, maybe 15 years ago or so, I found it terribly dull.  The second time I read it, about ten years ago, I found Fanny annoying.  But this time, I thought Fanny was a lovely character, and I wasn't bored a bit!

I think that was partly because of the annotations -- as always, I learned a LOT from those.  But it was also because I read this as part of the #JaneAustenDeepDive2024 group buddy read on Instagram.  Discussing the book with other readers really helped me settle my own opinions about the characters, and especially about the romance between Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram.  I've never had much patience with Edmund before, because he seems so ridiculously unable to see the truth about either Fanny or Mary Crawford (or many other people around him), but this time, I could see how that is not necessarily a character flaw -- he sees the good in people and disregards the rest, which doesn't make him dumb.  It just makes him kind of endearingly naïve.  While Fanny did sometimes displease me a little with how she tends to do the reverse and see bad things in people while ignoring their better points, I didn't find her completely annoying this time.  In fact, I enjoyed the book!  Yay!  Total win.

Particularly Good Bits:

Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply (p. 428).

"Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how.  It is a part of an Englishman's constitution.  His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct" (p. 606).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for the text for some discussions of adultery, and PG-13 for the annotations for some franker (but still tasteful) discussions of sexual matters. 

This has been my 29th book read and reviewed for my 4th Classics Club list.

"The Annotated Northanger Abbey" by Jane Austen (Annotated and Edited by David M. Shapard)

I'm halfway through my ongoing quest to read all these annotated Austen editions!  The #JaneAustenDeepDive reading group on Instagram has been a continual delight, and the two-months-per-book pace has been perfect for me to read these detailed and informative editions.  

I think I learned more from The Annotated Northanger Abbey than from the Pride and Prejudice or the Sense and Sensibility, largely because this one explained alllllll the allusions to popular novels that Austen makes throughout the book.  One day, I will read some of the books she talks about, just to more fully understand this one.

Northanger Abbey remains tied with Pride and Prejudice as my second-favorite Jane Austen.  Up next for our group read-along is Mansfield Park, which is my least-favorite Austen.  I'm hoping that reading the annotated edition will help me appreciate it better.

If you don't know, this book is about a young woman who loves to read Gothic romance books, that era's version of romantic suspense, basically.  She travels to a resort town with some friends of her family, where she makes new friends and forms an attachment with a charming man with a great sense of humor.  But she lets her imagination start to run away from her sometimes, and has to learn to differentiate between fact and fiction.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some mild bad language in the text, and PG-13 for the annotations, which talk about sexual mores and attitudes at the time.

"The Annotated Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen (Annotated and Edited by David M. Shapard)

This is the second time I've read The Annotated Sense and Sensibility, which pairs Jane Austen's classic novel with extensive notes and commentaries by David M. Shapard.  I used this edition back in 2021 when I led a read-along here for S&S, and I very much enjoyed learning from it.  So, when I decided to join the #JaneAustenDeepDive2024 reading group on Instagram, I decided I wanted to read all of these annotated editions.  We're taking two months to read each book, and really having a great time discussing things very thoroughly.  

That slower pace is ideal for these annotated editions because they really do take a lot longer to read -- there are thousands of notes in here explaining everything from naming conventions to social niceties to the differences between a carriage and a barouche, to what kinds of food would be common in that era for different classes.  Because history fascinates me, I absolutely loved reading this edition, even for the second time!

However, reading a thoroughly annotated book like this is a very different experience from reading the novel on its own.  I can't fully immerse myself in the story because, every paragraph or two, I have to stop reading the novel to read an explanatory note.  So, because I love history, I found it very enjoyable, but enjoyable in a different way from simply losing myself in the story.

That means that I would not recommend reading this annotated edition if it is your first time reading Sense and Sensibility.  But if you have read it before, and you want to understand the society and world and times that the story takes place in and was written in, then it can be very wonderful.

I know this review is mostly about the annotations, not the story itself.  Briefly, this is the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, whose father dies at the beginning of the book, and they and their mother and younger sister must move away from their home and live in a much smaller and poorer way than they are used to.  Both Elinor and Marianne fall in love, but their different temperaments and personalities, and the very different nature of the men they fall in love with, means that they have very different experiences in love.  The whole book is a meditation on whether or not it's wiser to let your heart by ruled by your head, or let your head be ruled by your heart -- or whether it might be wisest to balance the two.  It's a good book, but not a high favorite of mine.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for the text and PG-13 for the annotations, which talk about subjects such as unwed pregnancy in a much more frank way than the text does.  Nothing salacious, and no bad language, but not necessarily something I would hand to a young teen, either.

This has been my 23rd book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list.

"The Annotated Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler, edited by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto

Well, this was fantastic.  I've never read a fully annotated novel before, just annotated versions of Hamlet, but I am now a firm fan.  It's like a movie with a commentary track, but as a book.  It was absolutely fascinating.  I learned SO many cool things from these notes!  From explaining slang to discussing the LA setting to exploring the major themes, this book's notes had everything.

And I do mean everything, so if you don't want the more seedy subtext of the the book brought forward, don't read this.  It will delve into the depravities that Chandler only hints at, and that's definitely not something everyone would want to read.  So do be aware of that, okay?

It took me like two weeks to read this, but that's only because I was enjoying it so much that I read it in little bites and nibbles so as to make it last as long as possible.  

If you want to know what The Big Sleep is about, I reviewed it pretty fully here in 2017.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for the book's text, R for the annotations.  No sexual explicitness, exactly, but definitely discussions of sexual topics, drugs, violence, etc.

This is my fourth book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.