These are cross-posted, hence the copy-paste feel. Mostly included for completion purposes.
1. Agnes Gray, Anne Bronte
I’m fairly conventional about what I read, to be frank. I loved Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, but they were the only things I’d read by the Bronte sisters, and those are the best known among everything they wrote. Well, it’s justified for Emily, because that’s all she wrote, but that’s a whole ‘nother ballpark. Recently, I was told I was a bit of a book snob, so I thought I’d branch out a bit on my snobby-book-ness.
Now, Anne Bronte…let’s just say there’s a reason she’s the most overlooked of the sisters. Her prose style is pedantic, verging on the preachy, which irked me as I read; her plot and characters are dry, stale, and thoroughly unsympathetic. For the first half of the book, she explores some interesting social issues about how much was expected of governesses versus how little power they actually had, as well as, to some degree, class conflict and how little respect servants actually got at the time; some of the parallels to the modern day were very creepy. If she had stuck to that, I would have liked the book in the same way I like history, but it almost seems like she was obliged to stick in a romance that just bogged everything down. I wonder what made her feel the pressure to do that...
A study. The walls are lined by shelves, which are filled with books, set up in neat rows. ANNE is hunched over a writing desk, which is lit by sunlight steaming in from the nearby window; the desk is bare except for a neat stack of papers, the pages of a half-finished manuscript. CHARLOTTE watches her sister write in silence, nodding to herself as she reads along.
CHARLOTTE: pointedly, as though lecturing a child You know that you’re never gonna be able to actually sell copies of that social commentary crap, right?
Anne looks up from her work. She seems confused and turns to face her sister.
ANNE: But…. She pauses. But I’m giving insightful social commentary!
CHARLOTTE: So? NO ONE CARES. Trust me, I’m an expert. Unlike you, I’ve actually sold something. Anne looks hurt, and Charlotte hastily backtracks. Hey, now, don’t take that the wrong way. Just take this as good sisterly advice. Put a romance in, and then people might actually take a look at it.
ANNE: quietly B-but I’m a shy recluse, and I don’t know anything about that.
CHARLOTTE: Too bad. Make something up.
ANNE: Make…?
CHARLOTTE: She makes an impatient hand gesture. It’s fiction, not real life, dumbass.
ANNE: …okay, if you think so.
She takes one last look at the partly written on page in front of her and, sighing, crumples it up, tossing it over her shoulder. The ball of paper falls to the ground.
CHARLOTTE: There, see? We’ll make a real author of you yet!
*cough* Anyway, so Anne Agnes ends up spending the latter half of the novel mostly moping around about how she can’t get the guy she wants because she has no backbone and how pious and good he is and how she will never have a chance with him because…blah blah blah, I don’t care, wimp. Ugh. My biggest problem with the latter half is that the guy she falls for is a complete spineless wimp, too. I guess they deserve each other. Overall, I thought it was okay, but it definitely deteriorates in the second half.
2. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
I found this book on my dad’s shelf and had vaguely heard of it, so I gave it a read. It became obvious pretty quickly that this was the kind of book you either love or hate with a passion. The best way to describe this book is as a sort of modern day Gulliver’s Travels, except with a thoroughly annoying, irredeemable protagonist.
Allow me to introduce Ignatius J. Reilly: a lazy, whiny self-professed philosopher obsessed with the writings of Boethius, deeply moralistic and worshipper of the goddess Fortuna, a frequent movie-goer and fat slob—a man of infinite contradictions. Despite his ~superior intellect, he has no practical skills, so he continues to mooch off his mom while “working” on a book on Boethius. When she gets drunk one night, however, and crashes the family car into a building, she finds her dead husband’s life insurance isn’t enough to pay for the damages, so she forces Ignatius to go out and find a job. That’s just an excuse, though, for the many misadventures that we find our anti-hero Ignatius being entangled in throughout the rest of the novel, all against the backdrop of the crazy city of New Orleans, where insane subplots abound and no one ever behaves quite how you’d expect. By the end, all the characters have forgotten about their original motivations, so don’t worry if you do, too.
I liked the book, but I thought a lot of the humor was either dated or fell flat. When it was funny, though, it was very funny, as in hilariously, absurdly laugh-out-loud funny. Despite never liking Ignatius, I did root for him by the end, and the ending, though not happy per se, was imminently satisfying. I do recommend giving the book a try, but I can also see it not being to everyone’s tastes.
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