I was trying to think of something other than my children to write about today, and hooray! Educat, knowing what a book nerd I am, has tagged me with this fun reading meme (meme meme meme–it’s like some kind of chanting mantra). Remember when I kept threatening a lecture on the History of the English Novel? Well here it is!

1. Number of books I have owned: Fewer than there are stars in the sky (but only by a few dozen, I think).

2. Last book I bought: Quirky Kids, by Perri Klass and Eileen Costello.

3. Last book I completed: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for about the 3,000 time. This summer I’ve been reading around in lots of books about ADHD and autistic spectrum disorders; those are not books I really ‘finish’ so much as look into and consider and return to and consider and . . . you see what I mean. But Elizabeth and Darcy always keep me going to the final page.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me: Oh, THIS I can do. But you may want to get yourself a drink before I get started.

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Easily the most beautiful novel I have ever read. I wept the first two (yes, TWO) times I read it–once on an airplane, how embarassing–because the language is so poetic and moving. And unlike the film, which is all about sex (not that that is a BAD thing, especially when Ralph Fiennes is involved), the novel is about identity and race and class and the post-colonial sense of Self. It is just a beautiful beautiful novel.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion. This was the first Austen novel I read (although it was the last novel Austen wrote). I read it in college and again in graduate school, and over and over since then. Austen’s technique is remarkable, and the characters are complex and engaging. I wrote my first successful grad school essay on this novel, for a class in literary theory, which I was certain would be my downfall; instead, it was the beginning of my complicated relationship with genre studies and reader-response theory (yeah, whatever lady, get back to the novels).

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Or The History of a Young Lady. Published in seven individual volumes between 1747 and 1748, this is the longest novel ever written in English. The Penguin paperback edition is 1534 pages long. The basic plot is this: Clarissa Harlowe, the daughter of a rising middle-class family, is engaged to Robert Lovelace, a rake with good connections. Her family choose him for her husband, but then learn that he is of questionable character and break off the engagement, all without consulting Clarissa. Clarissa, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Lovelace and is persuaded to run away with him (or is kidnapped by him, depending on how you read the scene). And that’s just the first few pages! The rest of the novel follows Clarissa’s fruitless efforts to reconcile with her family, Lovelace’s plots to seduce her, and, eventually, their deaths. Doesn’t it sound like FUN? Okay, so why do I love this novel so much . . . because it is the Mt. Everest of English novels, because what Richardson does in this particular novel is essential to The Novel as we know it today, because it was the cornerstone of the Dissertation I Never Finished. And because really, it IS a fun read, if you happen to be a complete freak of an eighteenth-century studies geek. Like me! Whoo hoo.

Francis Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sydney Biddulph, which is unfortunately our of print (sigh of relief from readers). This is like a little tiny version of Clarissa, really; Sydney is also engaged to the wrong man, also has no choice in the matter, also falls in love with him–but marries someone else, out of duty, and arranges for her true love to marry the mother of his illegitimate baby. Years later, the two cross paths again, and, thinking that they are both at liberty (her husband is dead, he thinks he has killed his wife–don’t ask), they are married. But then, oops, turns out his wife isn’t dead and . . . so on and so on. This was the novel I wrote my LAST successful paper on in grad school; it was the first chapter of the dissertation. And I riled a bunch of people up at a conference one time with a paper about sex and duty in the early English novel, using this novel. Again, great fun was had by all!

D. B. Johnson’s Henry Works. Any book that teaches my children that the mundane is the stuff of great literature is important in this house.

5. Five bloggers I am passing this on to: I will be surprised if five people are still READING at this point. Or if five people will ever return to this site again. But please, feel free to tag yourselves–I KNOW for a fact that some of you (you know who you are) are big readers. And let us know that you are sharing, so we can all see what you read.

And then go get yourselves a copy of Clarissa! Did I mention that it’s an epistolary novel? Told all in letters. Yep. Sounds even better now, doesn’t it?