I have run out of books again, except Jane Austen's Persuasion. I have expressed before my dislike of Austen, and would never have read any of them but for the fact that my mother bought me a collection when I was in sixth grade.
At some point I have read Emma and Pride and Prejudice. I can't recall whether I read Sense and Sensibility or if I just read P&P a second time. I read them and remember little about them, though I remember wondering from the beginning of Emma why I ought to waste my time reading three hundred pages of book for Knightly to explain to that silly little twit that he's loved her forever.
Anyway, so I've been trying to read Persuasion. This one, in perfect opposition to the others, has a fairly engaging story line, but the characters are so entirely detached. It's as though the action takes place behind a blurry screen- you can make out what's going on, but you're not entirely certain who any of the people are.
Either I read carelessly out of dislike, or I fail entirely to "get" Jane Austen, because the people I've met who drool over her are not the type to read literature.
The other half of the time I'm rereading Ethan Frome. This book set my junior english class on fire. It was American Lit; we started with the Puritans, went through the Deists, we read Civil Disobedience instead of Walden and the class was outraged, but for all that CD has proved a very useful piece to have read, they snored through Huckleberry Finn and Old Man and the Sea (I read both in 5th grade, so I admit that I did a bit too), and even most of The Great Gatsby. But Ethan Frome had the entire class discussing. I don't remember why. Reading it now it's really sort of a foolish little love story, but it's incredibly involving. The fact of the matter is, since our narrator tells us that he pieced the story together, I think if there had been such a real story, it wouldn't have been any near so good as Wharton's engineer puts it together. He might have been a writer than an engineer.
I like Edith Wharton, though all I've read of her are EF and House of Mirth. Mirth is good. A bit long and boring in places, but the thing about it is that it seems like it has to be. There was a movie made with Gillian Anderson in the same year I read it, I think 2001, and it captures the style pretty well. My mother, who took me to see it, said it was one of the most boring movies she'd ever seen, but I don't know whether everyone who hadn't read the book would think that.