Jane Eyre. You know how I feel about this one. I am listening to it again and this time it is at least interesting, because I am picking up parallels between this and Wide Sargasso Sea that I missed when I read the latter: Jane’s connection to nature, some of her school relationships (and the school itself), the relationship with the servant, her status as an orphan.

I still hate Jane and I still don’t love Charlotte Brontë, but lucky Charlotte, Jean Rhys made her book more interesting for her.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. This book already seems to be getting a bit of an “it’s not all that” backlash so I will say up front that I loved it. Listening to this book on audio was pure pleasure the way Dickens is sometimes pure pleasure. I think that describing Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell as a sort of adult Harry Potter is a fair description, as long as by that we mean that adults prefer a little subtlety in our stories and complexity in our characters.

Reading that description makes me a bit leery of praising this book too highly, though, because I did not actually read it. The audio version was just great: well-produced, beautifully read, and the footnotes were fine and never confusing for more than a second. But for all I know, people are calling it an adult Harry Potter because the print version is full of ellipses and capital letters and all that J.K. Rowling crap that I hate. It sounded better than Rowling, but then you can’t hear the ellipses and capital letters in the Harry Potter audiobooks, either (which is why I listen to them and try to never, ever read them). So listen at will but read at your own risk.

Their Eyes Were Watching God. I started to reread this a few years ago and realized I remembered exactly nothing about it, although I read it in college.

Wide Sargasso Sea. I can’t believe how much I dreaded this novel, and I am at a loss to explain why I thought it was difficult the first time I tried to read it. I just finished it in two days, three sittings, and I loved it.

Rhys’s novel speaks to most of what I hated about Jane Eyre:

I hate pretty much everything about this book: the smart-woman-foolish-choices central love story, the narrative structure, the first-person point of view so that we mostly only understand Jane through her version of other people’s opinions about her (which, I guess, is part of the point, but I don’t like it and I think it ultimately amounts to a character who isn’t really much of anything). I hate the preacher. I hate the spoiler-in-the-attic. I hate Mr. Rochester. I hate Jane’s stupid fits and her visions and all the crap about God. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

Jean Rhys seems to hate all of those things, too, including the womanly fits that have no explanation in reality, the narrative point of view, Jane’s conception of herself, the terrible name that stupid Charlotte Brontë gave to the spoiler-in-the-attic, all of it. I loved this book a lot; the writing is beautiful and even knowing how the story ends and wanting a different ending for poor Mrs. Spoiler, I loved it and tore right through it. Fucking Mr. Rochester; I’d like to go back in fictional time and kick his ass. Hate that guy.

I did not actually fall off the face of the earth or anything. What I did was get married, go on a honeymoon, and get really sick. For a while there it was all I could do to read Anne Rice novels and drink tea. I wound up abandoning the Rushdie novel at the halfway mark, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because I just ran out of time and energy.

Now school has started and I am not exactly awash with verve and enthusiasm. I have decided to drop my writing tutorial because it is going to be a huge time commitment and it is not what I wanted it to be. I thought I would be able to work on my novel in the class, but the professor is really busy this semester and has instituted extremely tight deadlines and guidelines, and is actively discouraging anyone from working on a novel in the class. I would have three tight writing deadlines, including one three weeks from now, and everything that is handed in must be complete (a complete short story, which would be fine, or a complete chapter, which is a little more problematic because my chapters are all going to be long). And you have to turn something in at each deadline, something new, and there is a maximum page limit that he is being very strict about, and mathematically it is just impossible. And it is impossible in a lot of other ways, too, and I don’t want to write three short stories this semester just to write them and meet a deadline. I’m done with that; I’m too busy and it won’t give me any pleasure. So I’m dropping the class.

All that’s left is my comp exam. “All.” Just the comp exam. I am starting to be a little bit scared, even though I’ve read everything on the list except for two short contemporary novels. I should probably have felt better when I heard people at the informational meeting last night saying that they had only heard of about a third of the novels on the list, but that just depressed me. And no, I didn’t join that study group. Holy god, no. I joined a quasi-study group made up of people who work full time and do not have time to do work for other people, so we are going to check in by e-mail and share resources as we find them but not dump a bunch of work onto one another, which is the approach advocated by our advisor.

Jeremy is taking a post-colonial lit class this semester, which is kind of fun for me. He is a computer science major but he has a couple of upper division electives to fill, so I helped him pick out an English class that I thought he might like. I based that guess on the reading list, which has since changed twice, and on the professor, whom I only know from one meeting of a class I decided not to take. But I got a good vibe from him and I still think Jeremy will enjoy the work. I hope. In any event it will be nice if our study dates just involve sitting in a coffee house reading, and he doesn’t have to sit there and do math or something awful like that. And Jeremy has felt a little more confident about the class ever since the professor asked how many people had heard of the Booker prize, and Jeremy was the only person to raise his hand.

I am not allowed to know who is on the exam committee (since I am not doing a thesis I don’t choose my own committee; I get a list compiled by a secret cabal, and the cabal then scores my test without knowing my name until it’s over) but I am about eighty percent sure that his post-colonial lit professor is one of the three, and I am about ninety percent sure that another one is my Faulkner professor. (Linda Hogan on the exam list: that is the tip-off.) I am crazy about her as a professor, but she is a really tough grader, and it occurs to me that I actually could fail this fucker. I don’t think I will, but it could happen. Or I could pass without honors, which would make me sad. Because, dude: some people have only heard of a third of the novels on the list?

The third reader is a mystery to me. I actually think it could be my grad advisor, but he says no. I think he might be lying, though. Seamus Heaney is on the list, too. I have no idea who teaches Heaney. And I am not sure why I am obsessing about who is on the committee, because what I am going to do, offer them money, chocolate, or blowjobs for a passing grade? It is all pointless.

Anyway. I am back from the land of the half-dead honeymooners, but I am not sure how much I will be posting here. I have made a vow that between now and exam time I am only reading books for my test and maybe the occasional Mayfair witch novel (and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, if I ever finish it), and I am not sure how much you want to hear about that. I will post here if I have something to say, how is that?

Vanity Fair. I finished this on the plane, and I read huge chunks of it sitting on a beach in Mexico. Possibly while drunk. Between the tequila haze and the big overlap in setting between this novel and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I am not sure how much of this stuck with me.

I really enjoyed it, though, and I think maybe Thackeray does not get enough credit. I have heard this novel described as “fun” — which it certainly is — but as slight, with insufficiently incisive satire to make it an important part of the canon. I think that’s unfair, although I am not sure it’s Thackeray’s social commentary that I admire as much as his style, and the way he places himself as a narrator into the action. All the courses I’ve been taking on the postmodern novel like to reference the nineteenth-century novelist as a god-like figure, usually citing Dickens or a Brontë, but I think Thackeray is a good refutation of that simplistic view.

Plus, if you read Vanity Fair on the beach with a margarita in hand, it’s a lot like reading People magazine or something, only people think you’re smart. Drunk, but smart. Which is the reputation I always try to cultivate.

Breath, Eyes, Memory. I read this in one go, on the second leg of our flight home. I had finished Vanity Fair and I had nothing else to read, but this was easily accessible in Jeremy’s bag and he thought I’d like it. I did like it, although as with many novels written by very young women, it felt like a novel written for other very young women. Which is not a criticism, just an observation that it was maybe not the novel for me, since I am an old married lady and not very young anymore.

The language is very off-putting at first but I think that is part of the point, to put you in a space where you can’t ground yourself in the familiar. Once you get into the rhythm the novel moves very quickly, and sometimes I wished it would move more slowly because wow, do bad things happen in this novel. I would not really recommend this for honeymoon reading.

The Witching Hour. Also a novel for very young women, specifically for very young women who are too ashamed to buy real pornography. I am not ashamed to buy real pornography, but I am a little ashamed to read Anne Rice. Unless I am sick, or on vacation, or tired of reading important stuff.

I love this novel. I have read it about half a dozen times and I know that it is horribly written — overwrought, ridiculous, occasionally offensive — and the logic all breaks down at the end and certainly in the two sequels. But I don’t care. I love it. I kind of hate her stupid vampires but I love the Talamasca and I love those damned Mayfair witches. I wish she’d write more of these, even though I know they would be stupid.

I ordered a new copy of Lasher. Shut up.

Wide Sargasso Sea. The most dreaded novel on my exam list, and now I can’t remember why. I have read about half of this before, but it was a struggle and I really hated the book. This morning I started it in the bathtub, and I read 63 pages and enjoyed it a lot. I have no idea why that happens sometimes. Maybe my Jane Eyre hatred has just overpowered me.