futurista

One thing about hating a classic is that you know that there's going to be someone out there that hates you because you hate their favorite book. They tell you that you just don't understand it or that you didn't read it with the time period of its writing in mind. Blahdeeblahdeeblah. And maybe I didn't read enough to give it a true chance, but the truth is that these people annoy me.

Austen knows that she's written in some fairly annoying characters. She even has someone ask Mr. Darcy if he's bored with the conversation and silly girls around him. I think he must have said that they didn't bother him just to be polite. Luckily, I don't have to be polite; I can say that they annoyed the crap out of me. Even the fairly intelligent-sounding discourses like the one about the difference between pride and vanity or the one about what a person's handwriting said about them was just ... tedious. They're deep thoughts about nothing, circular stream-of-consciousness conversation for the sake of having something to say. I think I prefer a conversation about the weather if you're going to talk about nothing ad nauseum.

I was content to go onward with the book until I came across the episode of Jane's cold. Who can't travel 3 miles with a little cold? Jane. Jane can't. I thought Elizabeth had her head a little more securely on her shoulders than the others, but then she walks 3 miles to take care of her sister because she's so worried ... about a little cold. It's so very fortunate that Jane caught a cold at someone's house rather than when she was at work, at school, at the park, at a store, etc. Goodness knows someone would have had to build a house around her if she'd caught cold at the park and couldn't travel. She's not going to die of a little cold (unless her name is secretly Fortunato).

Anyhow, I was listening to the audiobook version of this and just let my time run out on my library lending period without renewing it. I get the idea I might prefer the story in text format since the person reading the audiobook made the annoying characters all the more annoying by giving them whiny, cackling voices. I imagine, though, that too many books will push their way ahead of this one for me to ever manage to get back to it. We'll see.