{"id":3035,"date":"2005-08-05T15:10:17","date_gmt":"2005-08-05T19:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/08\/05\/3035.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:50:09","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:50:09","slug":"book-report-pride-and-prejudic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/08\/05\/book-report-pride-and-prejudic\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Pride and Prejudice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I don't remember whether I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pemberley.com\/janeinfo\/pridprej.html\">Pride and Prejudice<\/a> when I was a teenager. Probably I did, although I didn't remember a scrap of it. It's equally likely that I read some other Jane Austen book or books, and decided I had no taste for them. And I still don't.\n<p>Oh, it's a good enough book, in its way, and I laughed two or three times at some of the jokes. And somehow I actually quite liked Mr. Bennett, despite his being a really unlikeably man. And the romance is all romantic'n'stuff, which is nice, and there's such a lovely escapist Englishness to it all that I could quite forget for chapters at a time that the Darcys' children would quickly be impoverished by trying to keep up Pemberly on only ten thousand a year. I suppose it's in the National Trust now.\n<p>It was, I think, Stephen Fry (or perhaps Alton Brown) who said that people are either Dickens people or Austen people. Or I made that up myself. Anyway, I for one missed Dickensian villains, and Dickensian plots, and Dickensian events, and would cheerfully have given up the gentle humor of recognition if only I could have one good monster.\n<p>I wonder who reads which. I think Ms. Austen, who is on the whole concerned with the way individuals treat each other within the often absurd constraints placed upon them by Society, is in a way more Modern than Mr. Dickens, although of course Your Humble Blogger has no real way of knowing what Modern means when applied to Litchratchoor. Somebody somewhere recently mentioned the preference for Internal Conflict in creative writing programs, and the disdain for External Conflict. Although both Mr. Dickens and Ms. Austen derive most of their fun from mocking society and Society, the conflict in Dickens is usually real and External, and is eventually defeated, while the conflict in Austen is internal and based on misunderstandings and misrepresentations, and is eventually negated. I prefer Dickens, myself, but different people like different things, and that makes the world interesting and fun.\n\n<p>So, Gentle Reader, Austen or Dickens?\n\n<p><i>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek,<\/i><br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t remember whether I read Pride and Prejudice when I was a teenager. Probably I did, although I didn&#8217;t remember a scrap of it. It&#8217;s equally likely that I read some other Jane Austen book or books, and decided&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17482,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3035\/revisions\/17482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}