Books From the Backlog #87
Books from the Backlog is a fun way to feature some of those neglected books sitting on your bookshelf unread. If you are anything like me, you might be surprised by some of the unread books hiding in your stacks.
If you would like to join in, please feel free to enter your link and link back to this post, then spend some time visiting some of the other posts.
This week's neglected book:
Bitch in a Bonnet Volume One by Robert Rodi
Non-fiction, Critique
Release Date: 12.11.11
Blurb:
Novelist Rodi (Fag Hag, The Sugarman Bootlegs) launches a broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a “a woman’s writer…quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic — the inventor and mother goddess of ‘chick lit.’” Instead he sees her as “a sly subversive, a clear-eyed social Darwinist, and the most unsparing satirist of her century… She takes sharp, swift swipes at the social structure and leaves it, not lethally wounded, but shorn of it prettifying garb, its flabby flesh exposed in all its naked grossness. And then she laughs.” In this volume, which collects and amplifies two-and-a-half years’ worth of blog entries, he combs through the first three novels in Austen’s canon — Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park — with the aim of charting her growth as both a novelist and a humorist, and of shattering the notion that she’s a romantic of any kind (“Weddings bore her, and the unrelenting vulgarity of our modern wedding industry — which strives to turn each marriage ceremony into the kind of blockbuster apotheosis that makes grand opera look like a campfire sing along — would appall her into derisive laughter”).
WHY DID I PICK THIS ONE?
About five years ago, I spotted a friend's review of this one and it put it on my radar. As many of you know, I am an Austen fanatic. Yay, I am one of those this author storms against, no doubt. But, then again, I'm not. I'm well aware that Austen wasn't writing romances, particularly, when she penned her six complete novels and even poked fun at those who simpered and gushed over those types of novels in her Northanger Abbey and lesser so in her other novels.
But, I spotted it in a sale a few years back, and of course, had to have it to see what is what. In one of my reading challenges, a co-challenger picked this one from my TBR for me to read in February. I've dusted it off and hope to get to it finally. Looks like a fun snarky analysis of three of Austen's books.
