A-Z Books My Parents Enjoyed: A is for Austen

My mom was a huge Austen fan. She adored Pride & Prejudice, of course, but one of the nicest aspects of my mother is that she appreciated all of Austen's canon novels. Her favorite was, in fact, Persuasion. She also was one of the few people in my life who thought Northanger Abbey is as funny as I do--and funny for it's very English irony about things being so much less dramatic than one imagines. 

As will come up again in this list, my mom could be quite critical of television and movie versions of books. She was an artist and almost always found the visuals disappointing (I see them as experiments and find them interesting in their own right). She deplored the black & white Pride & Prejudice for its historical inaccuracies--despite quite liking Laurence Olivier. She quite liked the A&E version (despite a few criticisms), which is another notch in that version's metaphorical bedpost. 

Austen is good indicator of how married people can have wildly different tastes. Early on in their marriage, my mom shared Pride & Prejudice with my dad when he was sick. The way she told the story, "He actually got up from bed and came to find me just to say, 'Why did you give me this to read?'"

Suffice it to say, in the Venn diagram of my parents' shared tastes, Austen was on an outside edge.