If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Note: Did you know that they made one of these without the sea monsters? By the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

I apparently have cultivated a reputation with my girlfriend that I don’t like Jane Austen novels. But really, I do. I just happen find them a little tasking when I am starting out, just like I do with anything that is more than 100 or so years old. I just have to work at them a little more than others.  It didn’t help that I read Northanger Abbey last year and hated it. She fancies herself to basically be Elinor….wonderful, intelligent, thoughtful, judgy, refusing to be open with feelings for the sake of others.

So I asked her, does that make me Colonel Brandon? I joke because they keep talking about how old and unappealing he is because he’s 35. I am 35. It’s a great joke. Brandon, though, likes them young, and aged, decrepit 20yo Elinor is no good. Or so she thinks. No no no, he likes Marianne, who reminds him of his young ward, who he can’t marry.

This is a really funny and fun novel in general. I joke about the particulars because they do always seems a little silly when you spell them out in stark details. But the focus on incomes, and estates, and clothing, and houses, is something that is interesting to me. I think a lot of the same kinds of concerns still plague me in my old age as I think about what I need/have to be able to start and keep a family.

You should probably read it. If you don’t find the second chapter where the Dashwood sisters’ sister-in-law is convincing her husband to disinherit them hilarious and familiar, well it’s only downhill from there.