Pride and Prejudice, and Austen in general

I just reread Pride and Prejudice for school, finishing it yesterday. I've read it before, but I think I probably actually skimmed it, because my reread revealed a lot that I didn't recall. However, if anything, it was worse than I remembered.

Now, I'm already known among my RL friends and classmates as not liking most of the classics, or their authors. Austen is no exception. I realise that she might have been a great novelist in her own time, but to my point of view, her writing style is little better than childish. Pride and Prejudice was rushed, the characters were 100% predictable, and I found most of them to be abominable. Her way of unfolding the plot seemed at once too rushed and too slow. I mean, it takes 320+ pages, takes place over the course of a year or so, and yet it's imbalanced. While conversations and letters and specific scenes and all might take up to several pages, she'll skip through several weeks in less than a paragraph, or several months, etc. Everything was written in a way that was entirely confusing to me, and I several times had to back up and figure out when such-and-such event occurred, and why was what's-her-name in what's-that-place, etc. It was, to apply a word from my second-grade English class, a run-on book. There was very little to differentiate between instances and scenes, or to tell who was who, beyond the main characters.

To make matters worse, I have to read Mansfield Park this month. I'm not looking forward to it.

Right now I'm sludging through Dickens' Hard Times, which is just as boring as all of his other books that I've read. I don't know what exactly it is about his style, which is superior to Austen's, but all of his books seem very tedious and slow-paced. Granted, I'm used to reading books by authors like Robert Jordan, Timothy Zahn, or Matthew Stover, but Dickens' books still seem to be exceptionally tedious.

He had a few bright ideas during his life, such as the basic plot for A Tale of Two Cities, but in my opinion he completely botched that book--it had a lot of potential, but he ended up writing it in a very unappealing way. And I know that it's not simply that that was the style during the era, because I've read works by Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, and both were very good authors. Melda, you know that 'good' entails a lot coming from me, considering my opinon of R.A. Salvatore.

So, anyways, there's my little author rant. I should probably go appease myself by reading something from Revenge of the Sith, which I awe at more and more every time I think about Stover's genius style of writing. Or I could read WoT, but I don't think I have time for that right now.

In terms of mere physical distress, I'm in a state of minor agony and major irritation, because I can't find the only hand creme that I've ever approved of. Everything else takes hours to absorb into my skin. Unfortunately, since I can't find the only one I approve of, my knuckles remain dry. I think they're actually getting worse--they are now almost constantly bleeding on one place or another, which is frustrating, to say the least. However, if it continues as these things normally do, my knuckles should be fine towards mid-December-ish. This year, though, I'm not sure how it's going to turn out, because my knuckles went dry earlier than normal this year, and they're also worse than normal.

I hate my knuckles. <_<

And I vote that you guys give me a topic for my next blog....subject to approval, of course. ^_^