Posting your summaries
Just a reminder: If you can't make it to a meeting and you want to post a summary anyway, please wait til I have listed the books presented for that meeting. Then add yours as a comment. That way all the the books on a particular theme are together. Thanks - Kathryn
posted by Kathryn at 3:47 PM
2 Comments:
Northanger Abbey - by Jane Austen
This was Jane Austen's first novel and certainly, there is a difference in her writing style from her later novels. Her plot and characters are not as well developed. Young Catherine Morland loves reading Gothic novels, searches for a romantic relationship, and is caught in the society of the time. There are three sets of brothers and sisters in the book, and each have varying degrees of relationships with each other. Northanger Abbey is the home of the Tilneys, and Catherine is invited to visit with Eleanor and Henry, whom Catherine is interested in. She imagines mystery and intrigue in the Abbey, as in Gothic novels but eventually finds her fantasies are just fiction and not reality. It's Genre is gothic novel, romance, and satire, published in 1817. I'm glad I read this after Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility as I think it might have put me off Jane Austen if I had read it earlier.
Yes finally a comment from Rhian!
All Quiet on the Western Front.
Written by a German Remarque in 1929 it should be compulsory reading for anyone contemplating war. It is horrific, sad, tragic and even funny in places.
A group of young men from the same high school are encouraged to fight for their country. This in the voice of Paul follows their lives on the front, and behind the lines. How they deal or don't deal with the hell that they inhabit.
Ivanhoe - Walter Scott
Set in 12th Century England where many English Saxons have not yet accepted the Norman conquest. Ivanhoe is a Saxon but he has gone to fight in the Middle East with King Richard. For this and being in love with the saxon heiress and ward Rowena his father has disowned
him.
Ivanhoe returns at the time when Prince John is planning to take the throne. His family, rebels living in the woods (eg Robin Hood) and a family of much persecuted Jews become tangled in conspiracy, after a tournament in which Ivanhoe disguised, is the outright winner.
I listened to this and enjoyed it but suspect that reading it might have been rather daunting. I was irritated by some of the dialogue.
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