A BOOK REPORT

so leigh stein and i run a reading series called the book report and you can find us downstairs at le poisson rouge every second tuesday around, say 730.

i don't really know what to do with all the book reports i've ended up accidentally doing for it as a fill-in reader, so i am going to post them here today.

here is one.




Jane Austen is a lady who wrote some books about kisses and the lack of kisses and so in her honor I am going to talk about some of those books here.




Sense and Sensibility is a book Jane Austen wrote in 1811 about how she does not know which is better: Sense or Sensibility? It is about the Dashwood sisters. There are two of them and one of them is real cultured and the other is real proper, which is I guess the opposite of being real cultured, and the book is about the struggle of which one gets to be right, or if they have to have a balance of things, like how a cheeseburger should have bread and lettuce and cheese and meat because that makes it balanced and also tomatoes I think but yknow some people feel differently. That is kind of what this is about. It is also about kisses, which are alright too, I think we can all agree. In this book are included vulgar, uneducated cousins, which are probably like the opposite of sense and sensibility, like vulgar and vulgarity, I don’t know, that could be an alternate novel, like some good fan fiction could come out of this kind of stuff maybe. People in this book get really ill, and then everyone gets married, so it’s really unclear if Sense is better than Sensibility, and I think some dude cuts off a lock of a girls hair, which I am pretty sure is a form of witchcraft, which is a thing that you can learn about at Hot Topic, which was not invented by Jane Austen, but which can be found in malls I think. So after that guy cuts off a lock Sensibility’s hair, he marries someone else and performs spells in secret, and so people are all like gross. I guess in the end no one wins. Although, also, everyone gets married. I found the summaries of this book to be very confusing, and I think Jane Austen really read the Amazon reviews of her book, because the next one made a lot more sense to me I think, pun not intended.



So 2 years later she published her next book, and it goes like this: Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners according to Wikipedia and it is the story of a guy named Mr. Darcy who is the epitope of modern romance, which is another name for Colin Firth in a sweater, and also some girl who is named I think Elizabeth. Jane Austen called it Pride and Prejudice so that people would know that it was a book by the author of Sense and Sensibility, because I guess they did not have big stickers to tell people that back in 1813. But so yeah, so Elizabeth is this girl, and she is really smart and lively and active and a totally hottie, but also she is really opinionated, and sometimes she like rushes to conclusions and stuff? and anyway so she interacts with this Darcy guy, who seems to be a huge dick, and one day she is all YO DARCY YOU ARE BEING A HUGE DICK WHY CAN’T YOU ACT LIKE A GENTLEMAN and he is all FINE I WILL and then he does and they fall in love, because when a girl gets a guy who is worth like a million bucks a year to admit that he is a dick and should stop behaving that way, then the only logical course is to fall in love and get married and say OH MAN REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE ALL CONFUSED BEFORE AND BEING DICKS IT IS A GOOD THING WE ARE RICH AND STOPPED ACTING LIKE DICKS HA HA KISSES. Also in this book other people do and do not fall in love, and sometimes parents are ineffective at parenting, and people get colds because of miserable weather, but mostly it is a book about how Colin Firth is a very handsome man whose smile can melt even his own distant and enormous heart.



There was another book but I don’t want to talk about it because what I want to talk about is the book she wrote after the book she wrote after Pride and Prejudice. It is called Emma. Emma is a movie I once saw with Alicia Silverstone about a very pretty rich blonde girl who doesn’t know what love is until it hits her in the face and she learns that love is named Paul Rudd. It was written by Jane Austen and published in 1815. It is about a girl named Emma, who is very rich, and who likes to play matchmaker. She is like the personal internet dating service for people she knows. It is unclear how the people of 1815 viewed the internet, but Jane Austen said that when she invented it and Emma, that she was inventing something that only she would actually like. It is in this way that Emma is like a box of chocolates. Emma tries to set up this girl named Harriet, who is played by Britney Murphy, who is dead, on internet dates with this fancy guy named Elton. Soon after this, Elton runs away to another town in order to escape the internet and there in that other town he marries the first woman he sees. Paul Rudd makes a face that says I TOLD YOU ALL YOUR MEDDLING WOULD NOT WORK OUT 1815 IS NO PLACE FOR AN INTERNET DATING SERVICE. After that some things happen and some people die and Emma gets jealous of a girl who has to go to work to earn money because of class inequalities and also there is a picnic and then that Harriet girl marries someone who loves her and Emma secretly loves Paul Rudd who secretly loves her back because why not.