Welcome to Litsy!

Recommended background reading for Pride and Prejudice #PemberLittens

I've tagged the only really necessary one, but feel free to read any of the Edgeworth/Burney books.

Jenni @sprainedbrain can you tag any new members since reading Sense and Sensibility please?

After a couple of months of reading small chunks in bed, I‘ve finally turned a corner and am loving this. I read 120 pages of this last night and only stopped bc my eyes kept closing. Hoping to get tucked in to it again this afternoon.

Makes me want to reread Evelina, which was wonderful.

#30JuneBooks #obsessedwith The World‘s Classics from Oxford University Press !

Happy birthday to the amazing, yet often forgotten, Fanny Burney! A line at the end of this novel inspired Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I highly recommend reading her books if you're an Austen fan! They were all the rage in the late 18th century. #janeausten #fannyburney

A surprising thing about my reading this year was to encounter trepanation - cutting a circle of bone from the skull - in six different titles, four of them fiction. (Portable Veblen; Saving Montgomery Sole; Fireman; Book of Unknown Americans; Patient HM; and Venomous.) Also, this is the first time I've kept track of stuff I did not finish: counting only those that I read more than a couple of chapters, the total was 7.

Cecilia was my longest book this year. I've still got another dozen or more that I know I will finish before the end of December. I'm more than halfway through the #LitsyAtoZ challenge that I'm doing this month.

I started this at the end of June as part of Reading in Bed's summer read-along and just finished it today. Long. Entertaining. Enlightening. Single women in the 18th century had few options, even when they inherited buckets of money.
If you've read this already, I highly recommend Laura's hilarious recaps: https://reading-in-bed.com/

Unfortunately, similar attitudes persist 234 years after this was written. 🙁

"his poor head is so vacant that I am sure if one might but play upon it with sticks, it would sound just like a drum."

[This 18th-century diss sounds remarkably modern, don't you think?]

I thought of asking Mrs Harrel fifty times why you did not come, but it always went out of my head. You've no notion how excessively I was disappointed.

Cecilia, unfortunate orphan, is surrounded by people who disdain literature. I'm finding her a very sympathetic character.

Cecilia now perceiving that the opinions of her new acquaintance were as pliant as his bows, determined to pay him no further attention, and hoped by sitting silent to force from him the business of his visit, if any he had, or if, as she now suspected, he had none, to weary him into a retreat.

Back in the 18th century, there were readers after my own heart: Cecilia gets up early and enjoys time alone with her books.

I've joined a summer read along over at Reading in Bed: https://reading-in-bed.com/2016/06/23/cecilia-read-along-summer-reading-for-peop...