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January 2023 Reading

MY GROUPS:

Star Wars Legends Fan Group
SW Mod Group
Jane Austen's Books & Adaptations


A Novel Role-Playing Game folder
NBRC RPG - Lady Zuzana

Reading Log:

MY PERSONAL READING CHALLENGE - 2023 READATHONS

Every month read 2-3 books that fit the category.
My Semi-realistic Goal: 40 points, My Dream Goal: 60 points
Points: 0/40

January: New Beginnings New Authors, New Series, New (Sub-)Genres
February: Febregency Fiction written or set in the long 18th century or non-fiction about the time period
March: Whodunnit Vibes Mysteries, thrillers or other similar (non-)fiction (true crime, intelligence, policing)
April: Re-reading Madness
May: May-the-Force Star Wars
June: Children's Day Middle-grade & YA
July: Jane Austen July Anything Jane Austen related
August: Shake-up your TBR Anything that doesn't fit my usual reading - genres, authors, topics,...
September: Sci-fi Fever Science fiction and Fantasy
October: Victober Victorian literature, historical fiction set in the Victorian era and non-fiction about the time period
November: Non-fiction November
December: Loose Ends Be creative - e.g. finishing on-going challenges or catching up with neglected series

1 point for a book finished in an appropriate month (might be started in a preceding month)
1 extra point for reading 3+ books in an appropriate month
0.5 point for a book finished in the following month
1 extra point for a book sitting on my virtual TBR shelves for 7+ years
0.5 extra point for a book sitting either on my physical or virtual bookshelves (2016-2022 - GR, Audible, Amazon) at the end of 2022

My List of Possibilities
+1 point edition

January: New Beginnings New Authors, New Series, New Genres

February: Febregency Fiction written or set in the long 18th century or non-fiction about the time period

March: Whodunnit Vibes Mysteries, thrillers or other (non-)fiction with a mystery element

April: Re-reading Madness
May: May-the-Force Star Wars
SW GR TBR (2016-2021):

June: Children's Day Middle-grade & YA

July: Jane Austen July Anything Jane Austen related + JAJ prompts

August: Shake-up your TBR Anything that doesn't fit my usual reading - genres, authors, topics,...

September: Sci-fi Fever Science fiction and Fantasy

October: Victober Victorian literature, historical fiction set in the Victorian era and non-fiction about the time period

November: Non-fiction November

December: Loose Ends Be creative - e.g. finishing on-going challenges or catching up with neglected series

My List of Possibilities
Regency/JA Edition

January: New Beginnings
February: Febregency
❤❤��
March: Whodunnit Vibes
April: Re-reading Madness
May: May-the-Force
✖✖��
June: Children's Day
July: Jane Austen July
❤❤��
August: Shake-up your TBR

September: Sci-fi Fever

October: Victober

November: Non-fiction November
December: Loose Ends

JA/Regency GR TBR:
Non-fiction:

Fan-fiction:

Setting:

Classics:

January: New Beginnings
February: Febregency
March: Whodunnit Vibes
April: Re-reading Madness
May: May-the-Force
June: Children's Day
July: Jane Austen July
August: Shake-up your TBR
September: Sci-fi Fever
October: Victober
November: Non-fiction November
December: Loose Ends

French revolution

Rest of the year TBR

July:

August:

September:

October:

November:
December:

1800: Castle Rackrent
1801: Belinda, The Father and Daughter: A Tale, in Prose, Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802
1802: The History of the Grubthorpe Family, Or the Old Bachelor and His Sister Penelope
1803: Thaddeus of Warsaw
1804: Adeline Mowbray, Popular tales by Miss Edgeworth
1805:
1806: Zofloya, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale
1807: Poems in Two Volumes, The Hungarian Brothers
1808: Marmion
1809: Coelebs in Search of a Wife
1810: The Scottish Chiefs, The Lady of the Lake
1811: Sense and Sensibility
1812: The Absentee, The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales: Volume 1, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
1813: Pride and Prejudice, The Giaour and Other Poems, The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson
1814: Mansfield Park, Patronage, Waverley
1815: Emma
1816: Glenarvon
1817: Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Rob Roy, Characters of Shakespear's plays; & Lectures on the English poets
1818: Marriage, Nightmare Abbey, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text
1819: The Vampyre, The Bride of Lammermoor, Ivanhoe
1820: Melmoth the Wanderer
1821: Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex


1784: Damon and Delia

Walter Scott:

The Tale of Old Mortality (1816) -> I Puritani by Bellini (1835)
The Lady of the Lake (1810) -> La Donna del Lago by Rossini (1819)
The Bride of Lamermoor (1819) -> Lucia Di Lammermoor by Donizetti (1838)

Friedrich Schiller:

Rossini's William Tell, Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, Tchaikovsky's Maid of Orleans and a total of four Verdi operas (I Masnadieri, based on Die Rauber; Luisa Miller, based on Kabale und Liebe; Giovanna D'Arco, based on Die Jungfrau von Orleans; and Don Carlos) were all drawn from Schiller originals.

Garbaugust:

Jane Austen July 2023 - (not so) final Wrap-up

1. Read one of Jane Austen’s six novels:
⚠️work in progress Northanger Abbey. I started reading it but stopped when I got to the Mysteries of Udolpho stuff. I really want to read that book first. I ordered Udolpho, but it arrived only last week. Hence I'm postponing NA for now.

2. Read something by Jane Austen that is not one of her main six novels:
��The Watsons
��Juvenilia in The Beautiful Cassandra

3. Read a non-fiction work about Jane Austen or her time:
��Tea with Jane Austen by Kim Wilson
��The World of Jane Austen by Nigel Nicolson.
⚠️work in progress A charming place: Bath in the life and times of Jane Austen by Maggie Lane

4. Read a retelling of a Jane Austen book OR a work of historical fiction set in Jane Austen’s time:
��A Hazard of Hearts by Barbara Cartland
��Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer

5. Read a book by a contemporary of Jane Austen:
��The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis

6. Watch a direct screen adaptation of a Jane Austen book:
��Pride and Prejudice: A New Musical by Paul Gordon (2020)


7. Watch a modern screen adaptation of a Jane Austen book:
��Nesmrtelni: Lubi Nelubi (2010 TV Movie). A modern Slovak adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
trailer:


Other Austenesque activity: I deep-dived into Jaineites' YouTube. Every day, I watched a couple of JA related video - documentaries, video essays, reviews, you name it - I tried it. Here are some memorable vids I can recommend:

-Full movies/ Stage Adaptations:
Pride and Prejudice: Lasting Impressions - 2006 BBC documentary on the 1995 miniseries:
Hazard of Hearts (TV Movie, exquisitely cast Regency Romance):
Pride and Prejudice: A New Musical by Paul Gordon:
Jane Austen's "Evelyn" by Adam F McCune (stage adaptation):

-Video Essays/Fan-made documentaries/(Video-)Lectures by fans and/or scholars:
"Pride & Prejudice: A Novel, A Literary Analysis" by Mauintainsofbooks:
Why Do We Think Jane Austen Was Boring? Victorians Ruin Everything by Lizcapism:
Regency Dance in Austen Adaptations (Dance on Film Series) by Dance the Past:
5 Things That Jane Austen Films Always Get Wrong About the Dancing by Tea with Cassiane:
The Absence of Anne Elliot; Why Netflix's Persuasion Fails by The Fat Culture Critic:
John Mullan on Mansfield Park:
John Mullan on JA's Heroines:

-Podcasts:
What the Austen: The Covert Lovers of Highbury - Deep dive into the character of Frank Churchill:
The Thing About Austen (Spotify or another podcast platform) - anything from them, you can't go wrong, everything they put out is gold

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February 28, 1993
Who Paid the Bills at Mansfield Park?
By MICHAEL GORRA
CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM
By Edward W. Said.
The title of Edward W. Said's grandly conceived and long-awaited new book, "Culture and Imperialism," deliberately echoes the titles of two great works of criticism -- Matthew Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" (1869) and Raymond Williams's "Culture and Society" (1958). Arnold saw culture ("the best which has been thought and said") as a safeguard against anarchy; the "and" in his title really means "or." That sense of opposing terms shapes Williams's work as well, a study of the way 19th-century social critics, Arnold included, came to view culture as a critique of "the bourgeois ideal of society."

The "and" in Mr. Said's own title seems more accurately chosen, since he argues that the terms it links are best seen not in opposition but in conjunction. Yet even so, I can imagine replacing it, not with "or," but with "of" or "as"; culture as imperialism, imperialism as a culture. For Mr. Said uses the word "culture" in both its Arnoldian meaning, to denote the realm of art and learning, and in the more inclusive sense employed by anthropologists. The two definitions fall into one. Or, rather, what the book shows is the involvement of culture in the first sense of the word -- the novels, poems, operas of high art -- with imperialism, itself a central fact of Western culture in the second sense.

"We assume," Mr. Said writes, "that the better part of history in colonial territories was a function of the imperial intervention." Yet in doing so, Mr. Said believes, we also assume "that colonial undertakings were marginal and perhaps even eccentric to the central activities of the great metropolitan cultures." And that assumption, he argues, is inextricable from our desire to excuse the cultural monuments through which we know the past for their participation in empire. (In consequence, a writer like Rudyard Kipling, who is inescapably linked with imperialism, has been pushed to the margins of the canon.) Charles Dickens provides an example for Mr. Said's argument, one that paradoxically enables him to demonstrate imperialism's centrality by detailing its peripheral status in the world of Dickens's novels.

Critics have traditionally considered the empire irrelevant to Dickens, for the simple reason that he set his books in England. Yet Mr. Said points out that his characters enact a steady commerce between the metropolis and its colonial margins, and that the empire's role on the outer borders of the novels' geography belies the degree to which it underwrites -- in both a financial and a literary sense -- Victorian society as a whole. It is the place in which fortunes are made and to which social misfits, like Mr. Micawber, are consigned. Yet everything connected with the colonies happens offstage, Mr. Said continues, as if the culture's participation in imperialism is not only to be excused, but excised.

One of the best chapters in "Culture and Imperialism" describes Jane Austen's assumption, in "Mansfield Park," of "the importance of an empire to the situation at home." But when her character Sir Thomas Bertram has to visit the Caribbean sugar plantation that supports his country house, Mr. Said says, Austen falls into "esthetic silence." We never get to see him walk across that other, slave-run estate.

That Mr. Said's accounts of Dickens and Austen -- or of figures like Verdi, Camus, Gide and Yeats -- no longer sound so startling is attributable in large measure to his own earlier work. He has argued elsewhere that what is most interesting about art is its "worldliness," the way it both reflects and helps constitute the political realities of its society; this emphasis calls into question any belief in an autonomous or "pure" realm of art and learning.

Mr. Said, now University Professor at Columbia, has long had a particular worldliness of his own, a double fame -- in the news media as a spokesman for Palestinian causes and a fierce critic of American policy in the Persian Gulf, and in the academy as the author of "Orientalism" (1978). There he described the ways the "Orientalist discourse" -- through which European scholarship came to define the Middle East as Europe's stereotypically exotic Other -- both legitimized and served French and British colonialism.

For Mr. Said the inescapability of that discourse kept -- and keeps -- the West from engaging with the actuality of the lands it sought to dominate, and his pioneering attempt to chart what one might call the textual manifestations of colonialism has had an enormous impact. He was among the first critics to show how one might mount the kind of sophisticated analysis of the close relations between literature and politics, knowledge and power, that now prevails in literary studies. No one examining the relations between the metropolitan West and the decolonizing world can ignore his work. If very little of what "Culture and Imperialism" has to say seems absolutely fresh, that is because other critics, working within the lines that "Orientalism" suggested, have already begun to explore the issues this new book raises (some examples: Gauri Viswanathan's "Masks of Conquest," Christopher L. Miller's "Blank Darkness" and Kwame Anthony Appiah's "In My Father's House").

But the model of "Orientalism" did have problems. In mapping the ways in which Orientalist discourse works, it fell, inadvertently but perhaps inevitably, into the very type of binary thinking it sought to attack, suggesting that there is indeed some "real" Orient whose radical difference remains unrepresentable in or by the Occidental mind. Appropriately, some of Mr. Said's most interesting chapters in "Culture and Imperialism" stand as an implicit response to the limitations of his previous work. For after describing the culture of imperialism, he turns, in the book's second half, to the "culture of resistance," to the anticolonial vision of writers like the Trinidadian C. L. R. James. Those chapters amount to an attack on "nativism," the systematic turning away from the West and its products that is often a response to colonial oppression.

The cultural "authenticity" that nativism demands -- the call for Afrocentric education is a good example -- is at best reactive; a phase through which most liberation movements must go, but one that Mr. Said echoes Frantz Fanon in seeing as a pitfall on the way to a more far-reaching liberation. For "to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious and political divisions" that colonialism imposes on its subject peoples. Nativism, he says, believes that we each have one absolute and essential identity, as blacks or whites or Serbs or Croats. Its other name is nationalism, and in the name of the people it can as easily build an empire as oppose one.

Mr. Said's account of the dialectical relation between imperialism and resistance is the most persuasive one I know. And I admire as well the equipoise of his call for a similarly "contrapuntal" approach to the canon of Western literature; asking, for example, that we play off a full awareness of the history that shapes the world of "Mansfield Park" against our "enjoyment or appreciation" of Austen's "irony and taste," while losing sight of neither. Yet even for readers like myself, whose sympathies are already engaged by his project, reading "Culture and Imperialism" can at times seem frustrating.

Its great scope means that it must settle for being suggestive rather than exhaustive about any one issue, any one text. And despite the overall strength of its polemical frame, its separate chapters remain too heavily marked by their origins as lectures. The lecturer wants to send his audience away thinking, so he throws out a great many ideas. But on the page they too often read as digressions, as a repetition of the ideas Mr. Said has developed in other lectures -- other chapters -- or simply as a string of names, as if that in itself constituted an argument: thus, "To speak today of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and many others like them is to speak of a fairly novel emergent culture unthinkable without the earlier work of partisans like C. L. R. James, George Antonius, Edward Wilmot Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jose Marti."

Yet that telegraphic style does not finally mar either the usefulness of "Culture and Imperialism" or its importance. If it is not a conceptual breakthrough on the same order as "Orientalism," it nevertheless stands as an urgently written and urgently needed synthesis of the work in a field that, more than any other critic, Edward W. Said has himself defined.

Michael Gorra, who teaches English at Smith College, is the author of "The English Novel at Mid-Century." He is at work on a study of imperialism and the novel.

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Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

Two of television's more prestigious purveyors of plays, the ''Hallmark Hall of Fame'' and ''American Playhouse,'' compete for the upscale audience tonight at 9, as Hallmark's ''Face to Face,'' on CBS, goes head to head with ''Sensibility and Sense,'' on PBS.

Viewers attracted to the ''American Playhouse'' offering by its title may be disappointed. Although Richard Nelson's play has to do with the testy relations of two women, it does not achieve the cool ironies of Jane Austen. And be warned, or reassured, that although the plot concerns a libel suit by one of these left-wing intellectuals against the other, it is not directly about the clash of issues and personalities that resounded in the celebrated suit that Lillian Hellman brought against Mary McCarthy.

Mr. Nelson is an American who has done most of his work in London; his play ''Some Americans Abroad,'' commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, begins previews at Lincoln Center tonight. In a press release, he attributes his lack of success so far in the United States to the ''very political and somewhat left-wing'' character of his work. That may not be the only reason.

What he gives in ''Sensibility and Sense,'' which opens a new season of ''American Playhouse,'' are six characters in search of a different world. To be precise, there are three people, two women and a man, whom we meet first in 1986, when their impressive careers are fading but their envy continues to flourish, and then in 1937, when as Ivy Leaguers, they are high on radical politics and prowling around the edges of sexual politics. Mr. Nelson's intention, in alternating their stories, seems to be to explore the connections between the personal and the political as well as to comment on the sad end of a dream; the older folks quarrel about Stalinism, but we are really watching lifetimes of discontent at their pique.

As the elderly Marianne and Elinor, Elaine Stritch and Jean Simmons set off sparks at every encounter. Icy, elegant Elinor has written her memoirs, in which combative Marianne, near death but still painfully alive to any insult inflicted by her best friend and constant rival, is caricatured as an Upper West Side liberal who has given up on their youthful ideals. Relations are not improved by the fact that Marianne is married to Edward (Tom Aldredge in an unrelievedly passive role), who used to be married to Elinor.

The two old women, bound together by history, command our attention and give Mr. Nelson's work its sporadic force. But when Ms. Stritch and Ms. Simmons are not having a go at each other, the play falters. The episodes involving the young folks, sometimes seen through the dim memories of one of the old folks, have little resonance. The actors (Trini Alvarado as Elinor, Lili Taylor as Marianne and Eric Stoltz as Edward) go gamely through their exchanges, having to do in part with an effort to get money for a new radical magazine, but it all seems like an exercise to prepare us for the revelations of how these bickering young idealists turned into such bickering burned-out cases.

There are no such revelations, however. The director, David Jones, keeps things moving smoothly back and forth between the decades, but the young characters and the old ones don't blend into one another particularly well. (Part of the problem may lie in the casting. How in the world did Ms. Alvarado grow up to be Ms. Simmons?) The device begins to seem arbitrary. The political ideas are familiar, the sexual competition elementary, and although Mr. Nelson's dialogue can be funny (''One still has one's beliefs,'' says the dying Marianne, ''even when one is bald-headed.''), it doesn't excite much drama. Perhaps he means to make the point that radicalism over the past half century in the United States has proved to be more words than action, a sensible judgment but not translated here into the sensibility of the stage.

SENSIBILITY AND SENSE, directed by David Jones; written by Richard Nelson; film editor, Girish Bhargava; costumes by Jane Greenwood; produced by Timothy Marx for ''American Playhouse''