Austen Novel Reading: Please join us!

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions for our Austen reading. 

The consensus seems to be that we read either Pride and Prejudice or Mansfield Park.

Excellent choices. :)

And if you were thinking you'd rather do another one, don't despair. I hope to be able to host other Austen readings after this one!

Weekly Discussions

You are all up to doing weekly discussions, which was what I was thinking as well, so I'm glad we all agree!

I will post a schedule in the next day or two, with our discussion posts starting next Monday, October 7.  As you will see, Jane Austen's chapters are generally quite short -- sometimes not much more than a page-- compared to chapter lengths in most books written today. So I think that 4-6 chapters a week will probably not be too much to read. I am thinking that we should give ourselves about 10 weeks for this discussion, that way we will finish up before Christmas, which I know can be a hectic time of year.

I will post a few discussion questions to help us get the conversation started. However, I hope that you will feel free to comment or discuss anything that strikes your fancy. I also may take up Andrea's suggestion of asking some of you to do a guest discussion post. Please let me know if you are willing or interested in doing this. :-)

Spoilers
I hope, Jessica P., you won't be too upset with me, but I think that I will allow spoilers, as a general rule, although I will encourage you not to go overboard with them. If you write a post that includes significant spoilers, please write SPOILER at the top of the post.

Blogger Comment Problems

The other issue, which I hope will be resolved soon, are the problems with the comments on Blogger. First, I have removed the requirement to be a registered Blogger user, so that you should be able to comment, even anonymously.

Second, it appears that in order to comment in Blogger, you must have 3rd party cookies enabled on your browser. If you don't feel comfortable doing this (or you don't know how to change this), please email me (see the Contact form at the bottom of the blog) and we can work together to figure this out.  At last resort, for discussion purposes, you can always email me your comments, and then I can post them for you on the blog.

I hope the Blogger platform will not be too much of a hindrance to our discussion. If it does become that, I will get my tech-support (i.e., my husband)...to help me figure out a solution quickly. ;-)

So....now that I have stalled long enough, and come to the end of this blog post, I must decide which book we shall do....This is a really hard decision for the fairly indecisive person that I am.

Ok, I've just decided:

Pride and Prejudice

It is a clear favorite with you all -- one of mine as well. We'll make Mansfield Park the next one. :) Plus, 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. So what better way to celebrate?

Resources:

etexts here and here
audiobooks: There are several Youtube versions; go here and here, for two of them.

So that you can get started immediately:

Week 1 Discussion Post will be Monday, Oct 7th, and we will discuss Chapters 1-6

Happy Reading! I look forward to a discussion as lively as our heroine. :-)