First, briefly: I got the job at Fairfield! The peasants rejoice! Ahem.
Second, yesterday was the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, and the Atlantic has a series of posts this week reporting on readers' favorite characters, quotations, and first encounters. My first encounter wasn't a successful one. The year was 1998, and I really liked the movie You've Got Mail, a movie that's held up surprisingly well, considering the number of times you have to listen to the AOL loading noises. In it, Meg Ryan's character talks to her internet pen pal about her love of P & P, and Tom Hanks tries reading it to please her but gives up in disgust, not impressed by the famous scene of Darcy snubbing Elizabeth. I, in turn, decided I wanted to read this classic novel, but instead of taking it out from the library, I used AOL and brought up an HTML version through Project Gutenberg (or some similar site). The poor quality of the online reading experience might help explain why I wasn't really impressed, but I do remember that, like Tom Hanks, I got to the dance scene with the snub and was like "...that's it?" I'm not sure if I even finished the book at all at that time, and neither am I sure when I fell in love with it or any of her other books. I searched my blog for mentions of Jane Austen, and the earliest is from 2004, when I mention planning to re-read P&P, so evidently by that time I had read it--definitely in a physical copy.
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