Month: March 2026

The joy of re-reading – “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen

There will never be enough time to read all the books I want to read. As I get older, this is a fact I am trying to come to terms with. One brief stroll around a bookshop has me adding so many titles to my mental TBR list and that makes it hard to walk away from special offers! The result is that I have dozens of impulse-purchased books on my shelves that I aspire to one day get around to. Even worse is the charity bookshop, where the financial consequences of over-purchasing are lower. (Let’s not forget that, although book prices are increasing, the cost per hour of pleasure derived remains pretty low). 

So, with so many new books being published every day, self-published books, audiobooks, and, indeed, other high quality content (such as book blogs!) there is much competing for our reading attention. As such, re-reading can feel like a bit of a luxury. My husband is a great re-reader, often choosing to go back to things that he feels still have more to give. Me, less so. So, when my book club decided it was time for a classic, we picked up on the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth at the end of last year (16th December 2025) and chose Sense and Sensibility, which I had last read when I was an undergraduate at London University. As an Austen lover, I knew the story well, of course, plus I’ve watched the (in my view) iconic 1995 film by Ang Lee, starring Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman. There is also a 2008 BBC television adaptation which received good reviews, and which purports to focus more on the sisters’ burgeoning sexual awakening, but I haven’t seen this. 

Going back to the text, however, sent me on a journey I did not expect. I did half read, half listen – the audiobook was read by Rosamund Pike, and I appreciated her narration very much – but sometimes I found myself listening to a section or a chapter and then going back to my paperback book, because the text was so rich that I just wanted to savour the words on the page, as the author intended. One problem I had (and I have found this with other classics that I have revisited that I already own copies of) is that my Penguin paperback dates from the late 1980s when I would have bought it whilst at university, and the text is so tiny! The conversation at the very beginning of the book between John Dashwood and his wife Fanny, where they are discussing how much of the inheritance he should give up for his widowed step-mother and his three sisters to live on (fulfilling the stipulation in his late father’s will that he should provide for them) is priceless! When you think that it is likely Austen was perhaps nineteen or twenty years old when she wrote this novel, it makes her talent as a writer and as an observer of human nature even more astounding.

Which brings me on to my own maturity as a reader of this novel, compared to the teenager I was when I first encountered it. I was always a pretty sensible young person, so would probably have identified with Elinor more than Marianne anyway (I really can’t remember!). But Sense and Sensibility is considered to be one of Jane Austen’s more problematic novels in the sense that the outcome for the younger sister, Marianne, she of the more emotional, romantic, impetuous nature, is not really satisfactory; Willoughby, the man she falls so deeply in love with, turns out to be flawed and unreliable, and she is ultimately married off to the much less stimulating Colonel Brandon, a decent husband for the young Marianne but rather far from being the man of her dreams. A neat ending but fraught with disappointment. A younger reader might react more strongly to Marianne being unable to choose a life-partner more compatible with her own personality. As a mother of daughters around this age (though definitely not considering marriage!) I found myself very glad indeed that Marianne did not end up with the feckless Willoughby (prepared to bad-mouth his own new wife!). Brandon is definitely more solid, but I would certainly want my daughters (and my son) marrying for love and not prospects. But that is the Georgian era for you – the brother inherits the lot and leaves his sisters in virtual poverty, so what else could they do? And it is a world that Jane Austen well understood. 

I love this novel, I love everything by Jane Austen, even though she was clearly not at the peak of her writing powers at this point. She was still honing her craft. Pride and Prejudice was published just two years later, in 1813 and there is a huge evolution in her abilities, showing us just what a unique gift she had. Her canon is small but remarkable and each of the novels has its strengths and bears re-reading many times. 

I would like to think that I might re-read all of the novels in the coming months and years, see how I react to them well past the age that Austen lived. I visited her home in Chawton, Hampshire many years ago. I’d like to go there again. It is worth seeing the tiny desk from where she wrote these novels, by hand. If I manage to re-read all these novels, I will treat myself to the trip!

Booker shortlist review #5 – “Flashlight” by Susan Choi

This is my last review from last year’s Booker Prize shortlist and comes from American novelist Susan Choi. This is her sixth novel and her other works have been highly acclaimed although she had not crossed my radar before now. Flashlight is a novel with a wide scope, spanning several decades to tell the story of one family. That family comprises Serk, his wife Anne and their daughter Louisa. Seek was born in Korea. His family moved to Japan when he was young but were then lured back to the new Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). Serk refused to go and later moved to the United States where he became an academic. In the US he meets and marries Anne and they have Louisa. Anne’s son from an earlier relationship, Tobias, is also significant. She was largely estranged from him until his teenage years, kept apart by the boy’s father. There are a handful of other minor characters.

The story begins with a drowning – Serk and 10 year old Louisa are walking on a beach in Japan; Serk is undertaking an academic secondment there and has taken his family with him. Water and swimming are recurring motifs in the book and Serk cannot swim. The pair do not return home after their evening walk and Louisa is found on the beach the next morning, alive but unconscious. She has no recollection about what has happened to her father and he is presumed drowned. This is a monumental event in the young girl’s life. She is precocious and intelligent and has a difficult relationship with her mother, Anne. Serk and Anne had a difficult relationship and there was tension in the household which Louisa seems to have imbibed. It does not help that Anne has a mysterious chronic illness which limits her mobility and leaves her constantly fatigued. 

The plot looks backwards then, to Serk’s childhood in Japan and his family’s move to North Korea; they are outsiders in Japan, not welcomed, and are attracted by the offer of employment, housing and a good lifestyle in the new state, where they will feel more secure in their identity. Serk cannot think of going to North Korea and will instead move to the United States where he becomes an academic, though he will always feel somewhat on the outside. 

We also learn of Anne’s back story, how she had a child as a young woman, fathered by an older man, who then prevents her from seeing him. When she meets and marries Serk it seems like a match of convenience for both of them. Anne’s first child, Tobias, comes back into the story later on, when as a young man he seeks to develop a relationship with his mother and half-sister Louisa.

Louisa is a somewhat troubled child and, like her father, seems always to feel like she does not quite fit in. When the family moves to Japan she works hard to learn the language and blend in, but her father’s disappearance puts paid to her sense of belonging. We learn how she struggles at university and has mixed feelings towards her mother, from whom she seems remote and different.

There is a plot twist which I will obviously not share here, which gave the book some interest and purpose, but overall I found I did not love this novel. It is long, not a problem in itself, but I felt there was a great deal here that felt superfluous, for example, the lengthy accounts of Anne’s life and routines in the retirement village where she lives in her older age felt to me like they added very little to the story. The author writes a great character, but I really did not like any of them! Apart from Tobias, perhaps, and Walt, Anne’s friend, although both are quite marginal characters. There were also parts of the plot that I felt lacked credibility – for example, Louisa’s experience at the hands of border police in England made me cringe! The editor really should have got a British reader to look at this – we just don’t speak like that! This was a shame because for me it detracted from the really important story at the heart of the novel, the reach and cruelty of the North Korean regime, something I knew very little about. 

I listened to the novel on audio and I feel the narration was not the best. That did not help. I feel this novel could have been somewhat better. 

I don’t think the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist was a particularly strong one – the winning book (Flesh by David Szalay) was one of the top two for me, but I did prefer Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter. The fact of two very long books slowed my reading right down. I love a long novel but both this novel, Flashlight, and Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny felt like something of a slog. 

I would find this a difficult novel to recommend.