I know it's been awhile since I've posted a review. This is mostly due to being busy with work and school, resulting in me falling behind on stuff. I've definitely been continuing to read (quite a lot actually), but haven't been able to find the time to write reviews on everything I've read the past couple weeks. I'm aiming to catch up though, and hopefully I can get back to my previous consistency in terms of writing and posting about the books I've read (that's the goal at least).
So with that said, here's my first "catch-up" review. I had mentioned a little while back ago that I'm currently taking a course on Jane Austen, which I'm elated about, as it has given me the excuse I needed to read/re-read all her works. I finished Sense and Sensibility a few weeks ago and while this was technically a re-read for me, it was so long ago since I first read it that I honestly couldn't remember much from it. Fortunately, as I started re-reading, things started coming back to me about the plot and the characters. Of course, with this being Jane Austen, there's no doubt that I enjoyed reading this one — the writing was flawless as expected and the trademark wit and irony were there as well. But compared to my two all-time favorite Austen novels (Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice), one of the things that always bothered me about S&S was the dearth of likable characters (aka characters I felt like I could root for).
While I didn't dislike Elinor and Marianne (the main heroines) per se, I also didn't really feel anything for them either. Elinor came across as way too uptight for most of the story, plus I thought the way she was always so insistently devoted to Edward Ferrars (a man who didn't really have anything to recommend him, in my opinion) was bizarre (and frustrating). Marianne I felt was a bit too over-the-top at times with her behavior (which I know was part of the point of the story but still…) and we don't really get to see her true character come out, which I thought was a shame. Edward was a nice guy, but as I mentioned earlier, he was kind of useless for most of the story. Colonel Brandon was probably the only one out of the main characters that I liked well enough to want to root for. Outside of these 4 (and the villain character Willoughby), most of the other side characters were either mean, vain, selfish, arrogant, self-serving, crude, silly, stupid, or a combination thereof (Fanny Dashwood was the worst in my opinion: I'm still fuming about that conversation she has with her husband at the beginning of the novel…).
My annoyances with the characters aside, S&S is still a brilliantly written, complex novel with so many endlessly debatable topics (i.e.: the idea of each sister embodying sense versus sensibility or both attributes at once is something we could probably debate forever) — the complexity of the writing alone is well worth 5 stars. Reading the novel in a group setting and getting the chance to analyze as well as discuss it has been wonderful, so I highly recommend that if possible.
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