Complete Austen... Intro

Recently, for my birthday, we went to Borders. I had a combination of Borders Bucks and coupons that we were planning on using to get the special edition of Iron Man. It turned out that the special edition my husband wanted was at a different store. Since one of the coupons expired the next day my husband stated that I should look around and find something as a present for myself. That's when I decided to look for something I'd been wanting: a complete Jane Austen. I found what I was looking for and with the combination of Bucks and coupon managed to secure a $25 book for $2.67 out of pocket. Not a bad deal :)

On the way home I glanced through the introduction, but didn't actually start reading it since I was still reading a couple of books I'd picked up from the library (both of which are for young readers and both of which I would highly recommend). The first is Chalice. The second is Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians. Then I started into Sense and Sensibility. It was then that I realized that I hadn't read it before. That made me think that maybe I hadn't read as many of the Austen books as I originally thought. After carefully examining my memory to decide which of the books I've actually read instead of assuming I'd read because I've seen a film of it, I determined that the actual number was one: Pride and Prejudice. I know that I've read this one because I decided to (after reading it) read the "sequels" that others have written "in her style." These I would highly recommend....against. This necessitated a revision of my GoodReads list at which point I decided to remove them all even from my To_Read list and just show my birthday present.

This brought up another problem. I cannot possibly assume that I will like all the books equally and therefore have no way of rating them individually this way. So I came up with the plan of rating the version of the book based on presentation and such and I would list each book individually in my review as I completed it. Great! Except that I needed a place to explain all this without making my review ten pages long. Hence this blog entry. I haven't made a final decision yet, but I'm actually thinking of reviewing them individually here and just linking to the reviews in the review section on GoodReads. Either way, I'll be reading the books in order and wanted to list the order here so that anyone can follow along with where I am in the big book. Here then is the Table of Contents:

Sense and Sensibility 1
Pride and Prejudice 209
Mansfield Park 423
Emma 687
Northanger Abbey 959
Persuasion 1091
Lady Susan 1233