Title: Persuasion
Author: Jane Austen
Type: Fiction
Page Count: 270
Rating: 1/5
So it turns out that December isn’t too late to read your least favourite book of the year. Perhaps a lot of that is my fault, though. I’ve read some of Austen’s juvenilia and thought it was terrible, but everyone always says that she’s one of those must-read authors and so I thought I’d give her another chance. Her spelling had improved somewhat for this one, but not her writing.
I’m sure it’s all well and good if you’re interested in early 19th century society and the relationships between different people, all of whom come across as equally unpleasant. Add to that there’s very little plot, although I’ll begrudgingly admit that there is a little bit of one, and you can start to see why I just shrugged my shoulders at it.
It got to the point where after losing interest in the first fifty pages, I read it but didn’t absorb anything. That happens with Virginia Woolf sometimes, but at least she still writes beautifully at a sentence by sentence level. Austen is more like Dickens, except it’s somehow more overwritten (didn’t know that was possible) and instead of looking at important social issues, you get a bunch of neurotic douchemongers who are worried that they said the wrong thing and now their sugar daddy is no longer going to want to keep them on as a sort of mute house elf to perform basic menial tasks around the house and to bear equally unpleasant offspring. You could say I wasn’t a fan.
