Member kac522

2025 Highlights

Despite a lackluster ending to the year, overall I had a great reading year. I had some long-term projects and am fairly pleased with my reading.

📚Jane Austen: For the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, I read (or re-read) most of the novels and some shorter works in 2025:

✔️Sense and Sensibility, audiobook re-read and reading the 350+ pages of annotations of David M. Shapard

✔️Pride and Prejudice, audiobook re-read

✔️Mansfield Park, audiobook re-read

✔️Persuasion; audiobook re-read

✔️Northanger Abbey: Norton Critical Edition; listened to the audiobook and read the 200+ pages of critical material in this edition

✔️Lady Susan; audiobook re-read, January

✔️The history of England by a partial, prejudiced & ignorant historian from the Juvenilia

Nonfiction: about Jane Austen and her time:

✔️The Making of Jane Austen, Devoney Looser; Jane Austen in popular culture

✔️In the Steps of Jane Austen, Anne-Marie Edwards; her biography through the places she lived

✔️Jane Austen's Bookshelf : a rare book collector's quest to find the women writers who shaped a legend, Rebecca Romney (2025); part memoir/biography/look at the rare book business through the 6 women writers who influenced Austen

✔️So You Think You Know Jane Austen?, Sutherland and Le Faye; a quiz book of the 6 novels with questions & answers

✔️Memoir of Jane Austen, James Austen-Leigh (1870); the first biography of Austen written by her nephew

Works that influenced Jane Austen:

✔️"Lovers' Vows", Elizabeth Inchbald (1798), a play, referred to in Mansfield Park

✔️Evelina, Fanny Burney (1778); an author Jane Austen read and admired, and mentioned in Northanger Abbey

✔️The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox (1752), on audiobook, read by Juliet Stevenson; a book Jane Austen read several times and influenced Northanger Abbey

✔️Finally, I watched half a dozen film adaptations of Austen's works.

📚Other 2025 long-term goals:

✔️I've kept up with the Thomas Hardy chronological read of his 14 novels, reading 6 this year and hope to read the remaining next year, starting with A Laodicean in January 2026

📚Here are the highlights from my other 2025 reading:

2025 Fiction Highlights:

William: an Englishman, Cicely Hamilton, a Persphone reprint

The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, May Sinclair, A Virago reprint

Dr Wortle's School, Anthony Trollope

The Christmas Hirelings, Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell

Business as Usual, Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford

Rhododendron Pie, Margery Sharp

Two spooky stories: "The Canterville Ghost", Oscar Wilde and "The Library Window", Margaret Oliphant

2025 Nonfiction Highlights:

The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, Edith Holden, a naturalist's diary from 1906

Brave Companions, David McCullough, essays

Jane Austen's Bookshelf :a rare book collector's quest to find the women writers who shaped a legend, Rebecca Romney

The Truth About Immigration, Zeke Hernandez

The Life of Mendelssohn, Peter Mercer-Taylor

World of Wonders, Aimee Nezhukumatathil

2025 Most Rewarding Re-reads

Thomas Hardy: Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native

Howards End, E. M Forster

No Fond Return of Love, Barbara Pym

2025 Pleasant Surprises--books that exceeded my expectations

A Song of Sixpence, A. J. Cronin

The Black Tulip, Alexandre Dumas

The Trumpet-Major, Thomas Hardy

Here are my 2026 threads:
75ers: https://www.librarything.com/topic/377299#
Category Challenge https://www.librarything.com/topic/377305#