This is one of the sweetest little books I've read in a long time. It is exactly what the subtitle says: a collection of letters to unspecified authors by a woman who loves their books.
Because Grace never reveals what letter goes to what author, I felt like some of them were written to me. And that was incredibly encouraging. In fact, I saved this book to read when I dug back into rewrites on One Bad Apple after taking a hiatus in December. I'm so glad I did, because it really gave me a little dose of creative oomph every time I opened the cover and read a couple of letters.
If you're an author OR a bookish fangirl, I think you'll dig this book. I saw on Laura A. Grace's Instagram account that the e-book version is FREE today ONLY, January 13, 2020. So if you've been thinking of getting this, now would be a perfect day to do so!
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G because it's totally clean and sweet and innocent.
And yay! This is the first book I've finished for #TheUnreadShelfProject2020 :-)
There are several different places in this book where I wrote "mind = blown" because the nuances Jane Chance teased out of Tolkien's storytelling were so amazing.
I'm serious. She brought up things I never, ever thought of, and I'm on my seventh reading of The Lord of the Rings.
I'm trying to find words to explain all the wonderful things I learned from this book, and I'm falling so short. I'm going to have to re-read it again and again to really internalize and remember a lot of what I learned, but I'll share a couple of the things I found most interesting.
How about the fact that Denethor and Theoden's names are basically mirror images of each other? Den-e-thor. The-o-den. And that their "leadership styles" are also mirrors -- one is a kind and loving leader who "commands through respect and love," and the other is a "tyrant [who] commands his followers by edict, rule, law" (p. 90). HOW did I never notice this?
Or how about the fact that, while Gollum calls the Ring his "birthday present," it literally is Frodo's birthday present because Bilbo left it to him (along with Bag-End) on their shared birthday? I mean, dude. So amazing. And again, now that I see it, that's so totally obvious, but it's not anything I ever thought of.
My favorite chapter was probably the one at the end, "Heroic Narrative and the Power of Structure." I love studying the structure of myths and epics, also called the "hero's quest," and how they get used over and over in new and interesting ways. I'd previously identified a lot of things in LOTR that draw from the classic myth structure, but I had never before noticed that "[i]n each of the three volumes, Tolkien matches the heroic structure of the initial book to that of the second book" (P. 19). Which means for instance, that in book 1, everyone's at a great gathering at the beginning, Bilbo's party. At the beginning of book 2, they're at the Council of Elrond. In book 1, Frodo and friends go down into the valleys and encounter an ancient being who consumes some of them, Old Man Willow. In book 2, they go down into Moria and encounter an ancient being who drags Gandalf away, the Balrog. And on and on it goes.
Just fascinating stuff that I not only never noticed myself, but that I, as a writer, would never have come up with! My appreciation for Tolkien as a writer and storyteller have grown so much while reading this book.
But this book is probably not for everyone. If you don't enjoy analyzing texts, looking for deeper meanings, and somewhat scholarly pursuits like that, you probably wouldn't enjoy this book. Certainly you can understand The Lord of the Rings without it. But if you're like me and have read the trilogy quite a few times and enjoy peeling away layers to see the wordcraft and deeper meanings below a book's surface, I definitely recommend you try this book.
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some discussions of things like violence. No bad language or anything like that.
I wrote this review as part of this year's Tolkien Blog Party. If you haven't yet, check out the blog tag and giveaway and other posts for the party!
This is my eighth book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2017.
This is a fantastic little book. It goes through the whole trilogy in chronological order, pulling out events and examining them in the light of Christianity to see what they contain. Faith, hope, love, sacrifice, redemption, grace, desire, fear, death, weakness, danger -- there are so many wonderful topics packed into this book!
While it's set up so you could use it as a devotional, reading one section a day, I didn't read it that way -- I gobbled it up as fast as I could, underlining and scribbling madly in the margins. I'm teaching my niece high school lit again this year, and we're reading The Lord of the Rings together as our first project. Delightful! I'm drawing on this book for a lot of the themes we're discussing.
Particularly Good Bits:
Tolkien understood that our lives are part of a grand drama that both transcends and explains our experiences. The drama's narrative infuses meaning into scenes and events that would otherwise seem arbitrary and meaningless. Tolkien saw the adventure of our lives, like the adventure of his hobbits, as part of a story that began "once upon a time" and is moving toward its eventual "ever after" (p. xi).
C. S. Lewis believed that our desire for something better is a gift, a way of reminding us of what it is we lost and what it is we hope to regain (p. 2).
Tolkien saw our world as neither completely right nor completely wrong, but rather as a good that has been violated, a beauty marred. He realized that the only way we can understand that which occurs within time is to view it within the context of that which occurred before and beyond time (p. 4).
The true forces of evil in our world are rarely haphazard or indiscriminate. The occasional mad gunman notwithstanding, the history of mankind shows that the most destructive wickedness is devious and determined. Violent insanity is far less trouble than diabolical brilliance (p. 18).
It is only when we humble ourselves by acknowledging that we don't know everything that we are able to learn from others (p. 22).
Middle-earth, in other words, is a hauntingly luminous mirror image of our world. For we know that the world in which we live is a perilous place, a place where good and bad, light and dark, innocence and horror, glory and depravity march side by side and sleep back-to-back. We forget this at times, of course. In the course of our dull daily routines we often grow numbly accustomed to it all. But there are those moments when we wake suddenly in the middle of the night and remember that we are, after all, surrounded by terrors (p. 33).
It is our human destiny to participate with God in the ongoing work of creation (p. 112).
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G. Absolutely clean and God-pleasing.
I wrote this review specifically for this year's Tolkien Blog Party. If you haven't yet, check out the blog tag and enter the giveaway. There will be more posts coming this week, including games and another Tolkien-related book review.
This is also my 7th book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2017.
I started reading this during my read-along for The Great Gatsby because it's all about what was going on in F. Scott Fitzgerald's life and the world around him while he was writing, editing, and publishing Gatsby. I didn't have time in June to finish it because it was much more intensive and engrossing than I was expecting. I thought I'd skim through it for the more salient points, but nope, I had to read the whole thing. It was too good to skim!
The subtitle of this book, "Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby," refers to what is called the Hall-Mills murder case, a real-life unsolved murder in New Jersey that took place in 1922 right about the same time Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald moved to New York City for a time. The case was huge news, and Fitzgerald certainly read about it in the papers, for Churchwell found instances where he referred to it in correspondence and so on. The two murder victims were having an extra-marital affair with each other that bears some resemblance to Tom Buchanan's affair with Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, and Churchwell draws out many similarities between the cases, making the point that it may have influenced Fitzgerald as he came up with the ideas behind Gatsby.
But the book is about much more than that. Churchwell also delves deeply into Gatsby and the themes of wealth, power, and social class. She shows the world around Fitzgerald that he was trying to capture and the many things and people that influenced him as a writer. Then she goes on to discuss the critical and popular reception of The Great Gatsby and how perceptions of it changed over the years. There's way more in this book than I can discuss here, so I just want to touch on two things Churchwell discussed about Gatsby that really interested me.
First, I was fascinated by the parallels she drew between the characters of Myrtle Wilson and Jay Gatsby. I had not noticed them until this, but now they're so obvious I don't see how I missed them. Churchwell succinctly says, "[Myrtle] wants what Daisy has. Myrtle is the mirror image of Gatsby, who wants what Tom has. They are both upstarts, trying to foist themselves upon high society, poseurs who lead double lives (p. 67). Myrtle does a lot of the same things he does -- wants power and position and money, tries to get a better life for herself, throws parties, runs around with a married person, and insists on believing her lover will change her life. So fascinating.
Second, Churchwill points out this interesting tidbit: "When Tom realizes that Gatsby wants to supplant him, he gives Gatsby precisely what he thought he wanted: Gatsby is put in Tom's place, taking the fall for both Buchanans' crimes, Daisy's careless driving and Tom's affair with Myrtle" (p. 281-82). Whoa. I kind of sensed that before, but never saw it so clearly until now.
This book as a whole has increased my appreciation for Fitzgerald's writing, and I definitely recommend it if you're a fan of his, or of The Great Gatsby.
Particularly Good Bits:
Their story would prove that if you make yourself up, you can be undone, as well: being self-made risks unraveling (p. xxi).
A nation so fixed on progress will always be pulled, Nick begins to see, back into nostalgia, reaching for what lies ahead yet longing for what lies behind (p. 257).
Gatsby hangs suspended between chasing the future and longing for the past: the present means nothing to him. But Daisy is defined by the present. She needs immediacy, for she dwells in the shallows of time, drifting unrestfully and without purpose from moment to moment (p. 272).
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for discussions of alcohol abuse, violence, and sexual topics in a non-explicit way.
This book was not exactly what I was expecting. I thought it was going to be all about the bad and evil things contained in fantasy fiction, and why we should stay away from them. The subtitle of "What Your Family Needs to Know" certainly made it sound that way. But actually, it was a thoughtful discussion of what the Bible says about magic, the power of storytelling, and also how to read fiction in a discerning manner. My copy also includes a CD of an audio discussion of these same topics, but I haven't listened to it yet.
This book also discusses the first four Harry Potter books, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Narnia series. It gives a summary of each book, questions to think about or discuss as a family, and Bible verses that relate to various issues faced by characters in each book.
I thought I was going to read through this quickly, then put it in the box of books I'll be selling at my yard sale. Instead, I want to share the discussions of Narnia with my son, as he loves those books, and I know I'll be using some of the questions about LOTR next fall when I read through those books with my niece for her high school lit class.
This is my fourth book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Challenge 2017.
Once in a while a book opens your eyes and makes you look in whole new ways at something you thought you knew and understood. This is such a book, for me. I have loved western movies since I was about 2, and I have watched hundreds of them over the past thirty-some years. I've read western novels and nonfiction books, I've written westerns, I've played cowboys for countless hours. I thought I pretty much understood what westerns were about.
And then I read this book.
Will Wright posits that westerns are America's version of great myths and legends (which I'd heard/read before), and that America's taste in western storytelling changed because American society changed. It's a cool theory, and he's pretty well convinced me. But the sociological implications aren't what interested me the most.
What interested me were the story structure similarities that he pointed out. I'm not going to delve too deeply into everything he said, simply because there was so much -- I was underlining and making notes like crazy. Basically, Wright studied the top-grossing western films from every year beginning in 1930 and running through 1972, when he did his study. That gave him more than 60 films to study, and while he didn't delve into every single one, he did study them all and looked for patterns in the stories they told.
Wright found that the films fell into four plot categories, which he termed Classical, Vengeance Variation, Transition, and Professional. And I discovered that nearly all my favorite westerns have the Classical or Professional plots. There are a few that are Vengeance, but most of my favorites are either Classical or Professional. And not only that, but my own stories tend to be pretty straight-forwardly Classical. And I realized that I am not really a fan of Vengeance westerns, for the most part. There were only a few of the Transition westerns that he discussed, and I hadn't seen most of them, so I can't say much one way or the other on that one.
What does that all mean? Well, I'll share his breakdown for Classical Plots with you to give an idea, and then I'll give you examples of various famous westerns that typify each of those plot categories.
The Classical Plot goes like this:
1. The hero enters a social group.
2. The hero is unknown to the society.
3. The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability.
4. The society recognizes a difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given a special status.
5. The society does not completely accept the hero.
6. There is a conflict of interests between the villains and the society.
7. The villains are stronger than the society; the society is weak.
8. There is a strong friendship or respect between the hero and a villain.
9. The villains threaten the society.
10. The hero avoids involvement in the conflict.
11. The villains endanger a friend of the hero.
12. The hero fights the villains.
13. The hero defeats the villains.
14. The society is safe.
15. The society accepts the hero.
16. The hero loses or gives up his special status.
So, I don't know -- some of you might read that and go, "Okay, that's nice -- who cares?" But to me, this was giant lightbulbs going off, flashing lights, sirens, choirs singing the "Hallelujah Chorus," and so on. Because this kind of story breakdown, and all the great explorations Wright goes into in his book, are exactly what my writing brain needs. I look at this and go, "Oh my goodness! Now I can see what my stories have, what they're missing, what beats I've got in the wrong spot, and on and on and on!" That's what I liked best about this book, how it let me sort of tip movies I know soooo well on their side and peek inside them to see what makes them work.
The other three plot variations have breakdowns like that too, but I can't just share the whole book with you here, though I'd like to. But in case you're interested, here are some of the more famous films he discussed, based on their plots:
Classical: Destry Rides Again (1940), Whispering Smith (1949), Shane (1953), Cat Ballou (1965), Support Your Local Sheriff (1969)
Vengeance: Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1949), Winchester '73 (1950), The Naked Spur (1952), The Searchers (1956)
Transition: Broken Arrow (1950), High Noon (1952)
Professional: Rio Bravo (1959), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), The Professionals (1966), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1970)
(EDIT: I've linked the titles of some of those to my reviews of those films over on my blogs.)
If you write westerns, study films for fun, or just love lots and lots of westerns, you will probably find this book fascinating. But if you were bored reading this review, then you're not going to care much for the book either.
I wrote this review especially for Legends of Western Cinema Week, which is a shindig hosted all week long by Emma at A Lantern in Her Hand and Olivia at Meanwhile, in Rivendell.... Please visit their blogs for lots of western fun. And I'm hosting a giveaway on Hamlette's Soliloquy all week for this event, giving away five great western TV shows on DVD, so check that out if you haven't already.
Particularly Good Bits:
Violence in a myth is generally concerned with opposing or reconciling principles, while in literature violence truly exists between people and is consequently more convincing and more deeply felt (p. 149).
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for non-graphic mentions of violence, rape, and other non-child-friendly themes.
My mind has kind of exploded. This book is crammed with so many thoughts and ideas about Hamlet that I have never encountered before that I really feel almost addled. It doesn't helped that I read the whole thing in one afternoon -- I think I need to read it again, a chapter at a time, to better absorb everything Bloom is saying here. I fully intend to do so before I start a read-along of Hamlet this summer, because I know it contains many things I'll want to discuss and share then.
Actually, by the time I finished reading this book, I began to feel very unqualified to lead a read-along of such a complex, convoluted, important piece of literature. I'm sure the feeling will pass, to some extent, but I hope I can hang on to the sense of my own insignificance so that I don't start prating about the play as if I am some sort of Hamletian authority, since I totally am not.
One thing that Bloom really brought home to me is how much I love this play, but not Hamlet himself. Bloom says, "He does not want or need love: that is his lonely freedom, and it provokes the audience's unreasoning affection for him" (p. 44). Wow. That summed up so succinctly why I love Hamlet, but don't like or truly understand him. Brilliant. He goes on to say, "All of us in the audience share Shakespeare's ambivalence toward Hamlet, for on some level the prince frightens us as much as he attracts us" (p. 101). Exactly.
I don't have much else to say about this, other than that, if you've studied Hamlet before and wish you understood more of it, or if you love Hamlet and are always eager to see new angles and perspectives on it, by all means, get thee to a library or book store and find a copy. I'll share here just a few of my favorite passages, but the whole book is both short and illuminating. While I don't agree with all of Bloom's conclusions, he has so many excellent observations and ideas that I now find him invaluable.
Particularly Good Bits:
As a meditation upon human fragility in confrontation with death, it competes only with the world's scriptures (p. 3).
...it is a play about playing, about acting out rather than revenging (p. 11).
Polonius is an old meddler, and Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are confidence men at best, but the fragile and lovely Ophelia is quite another matter, and Hamlet is monstrous to torment her into true madness (p. 42).
Hamlet is so exuberant, whether in irony or grief, that his rhetorical excessiveness rivals Falstaff's (p. 55).
Before Act V, Hamlet is confident of his soul's immortality, but I think he is different after his return from the sea, and I suspect he courts annihilation (p. 71).
For Hamlet himself, death is not tragic, but an apotheosis (p. 93).
The prince may not be going to join Falstaff "in Arthur's bosom," yet he is going to move us to an apprehension of value gained rather than lost by his immolation. Though Hamlet's apotheosis is so difficult to describe, the audience's sense of it appears to be all but universal. Even to the most secular among us, Hamlet's death has vicarious resonances, though it cannot be called an atonement.... We tend to feel augmented, rather than diminished, by Hamlet's death" (p. 97).
If This Was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for discussions of death and brief references to sexual matters contained in the play.
I. Loved. This. Book.
Seriously, friends. This is the most readable, most thought-provoking exploration of Austen's books I have read. It's part literary analysis and part memoir, with the two intertwined so closely they form a cohesive whole. The author shows how his reading of Austen's books influenced how he interacted with people and lived his life, and how what happened in his life influenced how he read and understood Austen's books.
While reading about his life was interesting to me, simply because I like learning about people and their lives, what I really loved were his observations about Austen's books and how they apply to life today. And by "loved" I mean, "underlined more than 40 passages in a 250-page book." I'll be sharing a LOT of them at the end of this post :-) But not all, I promise.
Deresiewicz appreciates many of the same things about Austen's books as I do, and views them very like I do, so it's not surprising I liked what he had to say. He likes her wit, her sharp observations of human nature, and her skillful characterizations. And, like me, he doesn't view her books as "romantic." In fact, he had a lot to say about Austen's views on love and romance, and how unconventional they really are, both in her time and ours. He takes each novel in turn and discusses it, both analyzing it and showing how lessons he learned from it changed his own life. He began reading Austen's novels while in graduate school, working on his doctorate. He went from thinking they would be ridiculous, fluffy romances to writing part of his doctoral dissertation about them. And he went from being a shallow and self-absorbed hipster to a person who was not only capable of loving another person, but knew how to be a good friend too.
The only thing I disliked about this book was that Deresiewicz does talk about his love life more than I'd prefer, and he does discuss sexuality in the Austen books, so I can't recommend this wholeheartedly to everyone in the universe. However, he doesn't go into juicy details or get all salaciously descriptive, so I myself wasn't uncomfortable with the book. Not appropriate for younger readers, though.
Particularly Good Bits:
Austen, I realized, had not been writing about everyday things because she couldn't think of anything else to talk about. She had been writing about them because she wanted to show how important they really are (p. 12).
She understood that what fills our days should fill our hearts, and what fills our hearts should fill our novels (p. 27).
For [Austen], growing up has nothing to do with knowledge or skills, because it has everything to do with character and conduct (p. 51).
I could grow up and find happiness, Austen was letting me know, but only if I was willing to give up something very important. Not my feelings, but my belief in my feelings, my conviction that they were always right (p. 65).
Needless to say, not everybody wants to hear that their feelings aren't necessarily valid. In fact, a lot of people hate Jane Austen for just that reason. They see her as cold and prudish, a schoolmarm and killjoy (p. 70).
Playful, impish, provoking: this was Austen exactly, and never more so than in Northanger Abbey. Austen used the novel to make us her students. Henry was her surrogate, and Catherine was ours, and she went about teaching just the way that he did. In fact, she taught, in part, through him (p. 92).
Feelings are also the primary way we know about novels -- which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices (p. 99).
Learning to read... means learning to live. Keeping your eyes open when you're looking at a book is just a way of teaching yourself to keep them open all the time (p. 103).
Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories -- entering into their feelings, validating their experiences -- is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness (p. 161).
Lady Russell, whether she recognized it or not, was trying to protect her own dignity, not her friend's She was the person she was trying to save from being connected with someone as lowly as a naval officer (p. 190).
For [Austen], being happy means becoming a better person, and becoming a better person means having your mistakes pointed out to you in a way that you can't ignore. Yes, the true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same things (p. 194).
For [Austen], I saw, love is not something that happens to you, suddenly or otherwise; it's something you have to prepare yourself for (p. 220).
Austen was not against romance, she was against romantic mythology (p. 227).
Her heroines weren't passive, weren't piteous, weren't victims, weren't playthings. They controlled their destinies; they stood as equals (p. 232).
For her heroes and heroines, sexual attraction was always the last thing, never the first. It didn't create affection, it flowed from it (p. 233).
Austen's lovers challenged each other: to be less selfish, more aware, kinder, more considerate -- not only toward each other but to everyone around them (p. 235).
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for reference to sexual activity.
This is certainly an enjoyable approach to literary criticism! Two writers who have been friends since childhood read Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park and exchanged a series of emails and letters regarding the books. Hill had read Austen's books before, but Chandler had never read any of her works, which led to some very interesting discussions.
Of course, they discover that Austen's books are not "woman's fiction" or "chick lit" at all -- I myself have read enough history about her books to know that it's only in the past 70 years or so that Austen's books have been categorized as "girly." According to Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures, during WWI, soldiers read her in the trenches. During WWII, British people of both genders turned to Austen for a reminder of why they were fighting so hard to preserve their country. When the books were published, men read them as avidly as women, so it is only now that the idea of two guys reading Jane Austen would be regarded as weird.
I was a little disappointed that they chose to read Mansfield Park for their second book, as it's my least-favorite Austen novel. Still, I did acquire some new insights into it that, if I can remember them, will make another read-through of MP more interesting if I ever decide to undertake such a thing.
The authors digressed a lot, mentioning or discussing things like baseball, their wives, and popular culture too. They watched some Austen-related movies too, and talked about those a bit. But all in all, this was a fast, fun book, and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys learning about other people's perspectives on books.
(I won this book in a giveaway on Reading in the Dark. Thanks again, Hannah! This was such a fun book!)
Particularly Good Bits:
By illuminating what happens inside the human mind when it believes narrow things, Jane Austen is as good as War and Peace (p. 32) (SC)
And to those macho guys who are too ough to read anything softer than a violent crime thriller I say you are missing a lot if you don't read Jane Austen (p. 38)(TH)
A good book in a quiet room is still the most profound experience known of one person's art being downloaded into another human being's mind. Nothing compares (p. 38)(TH)
I am amazed at how much I loved reading pride and Prejudice. I also was sorry it had to end. In some ways it's a shame that so many good movies have been made of the Austen books. Because they give the impression that she is all about love and romance and clolorful flirting and manners. What the movies cannot get to -- or do justice to -- is the intelligence. And not just the flashing sarcastic wit of Elizabeth and her father. But deeper still into intellectual courage and character (p. 50)(SC)
So what characterizes Jane Austen for me is that she is a novelist of the mind. A writer who captures beautifully the interplay of intelligences when they are challenged by love and status and money. (p. 51)(SC)
Jane Austen allows male readers a secret look into the minds of brilliant, creative, virtuous women. one heroine (Elizabeth Bennet) outgoing, another (Fanny) introspective. But Austen's heroines are each true to themselves and win in the end. Classy women who combine high intelligence wtih inner strength and virtue (p. 122)(SC)
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: Not Rated. It's like a PBS documentary, kinda.
This is my third book read for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.
This was a fascinating book, with the kind of deep literary criticism I used to read all the time in college, which was so nice to get back to. Entwined with the lit-crit is more history than I ever expected. Not just Jane Austen's own history, or the history of her novels, but the history of the Austen fandom. In fact, this isn't a book about Jane Austen or about her novels so much as about her fans. And that's the real reasons I decided to read it, after reading this review on Austenprose.com. Because I keep feeling like I'm not the same kind of fan of Austen's books as other people I've met, both in real life and in the blogosphere, and I was hoping this would help me figure out why I feel that way.
The good news is, it did. The bad news is, it took me a year to read because I kept getting caught up in other books. But I'm glad I've finished it at last, and will probably use it as a reference book in the future.
There are 5 chapters, an introduction, and an afterword. There's also an appendix containing three folk tales from the Austen family that Jane herself was likely familiar with. Here's a quick description of each chapter:
"Jane Austen's Body" discusses fan's reactions to the fact that Jane Austen was a human being with an actual body, not an ethereal literary goddess. "Jane Austen's Magic" involves the way Victorians viewed Austen's books, often equating them with fairy stories! "Jane Austen's World War I" talks about how British soldiers in particular looked to Austen's books to give them courage and strength in the face of terrifying war experiences. "Jane Austen's World War II" details the way that both military and civilians used Austen's books to remind themselves of the heritage they were fighting to preserve. And "Jane Austen's House" shows how, by collecting relics in some way connected to Austen, her fans seek a sense of closeness with the author.
In the introduction, Johnson defines Janeism as "a self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm for 'Jane' Austen and every primary, secondary, tertiary (and so forth) detail relative to her" (p. 6). And while I enjoy her books, enjoy movies based on them, even enjoy books about her or her characters, I don't really revere Jane Austen herself. She doesn't even quite make it into my top ten favorite authors -- I put her at number eleven here. So what I have long suspected is true: I am not "a Janeite."
I'm okay with that.
However, please don't think that Johnson is mocking Janeism or Janeites. Far from it. Also in the introduction, she declares that her "aim is not so much to trace Jane Austen's reputation as it is to ponder what loving her has meant to readers from the nineteenth century to the present" (p. 14). By exploring how Austen's works have been differently appreciated and interpreted over the years, Johnson shows just how deep and multi-faceted those works truly are.
