Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Good old Jane Austen. She never fails to entertain. Sense and Sensibility was sufficiently pleasant, suitably suspenseful, and ultimately satisfying. The story proceeded at a constant, steady pace. The main characters, two sisters, provided interesting contrasts. Of course, it was all consummately Austen—single girls with little income and therefore little chance of marrying well, end up marrying well. But it is a charming plot device even the third or fourth time around.

Extensive immersion in 19th-century literature has conditioned me to the point where I can sense the feelings that were trying to be conveyed by these authors. I have familiarized myself with the language and its conventions through a glut of books and movies, and now I can understand almost everything that is said, and I can knock out a book like this in a few days.

At the gym once, I was watching daytime television, and a woman was promoting her newly released novel. She mentioned that romances are not just an emerging trend, for, after all, "what was Jane Austen writing two hundred years ago, but highbrow chick lit?" That made me laugh so much.

But how true. Austen's stuff is, fundamentally, just romance. But the chasteness, the propriety, the verbal sparring, the defiance of class, the delightful plot twists, the extensive vocabularies, the inherent reverence- it all makes her work something more.