Everyone has a little bit of the twelve-year-old boy in them. Unfortunately, my twelve-year-old boy was into computer games, not adventure on the high seas. Of all the novels I read this year, this was both the shortest and hardest. I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about Crusoe taming the goats or making his raisins or building his summer home. There are lots of film adaptations but I couldn’t find the interest to watch any of them, even the one with the hairy Pierce Brosnan. I found the Wikipedia entry more interesting than the book, which is a terrible thing to say. I did care about Friday, but everything about the character is depressing.

One day, walking up the same hill, but the weather being hazy at sea, so that we could not see the continent, I called to him, and said, “Friday, do not you wish yourself in your own country, your own nation?” “Yes,” he said, “I be much O glad to be at my own nation.” “What would you do there?” said I. “Would you turn wild again, eat men’s flesh again, and be a savage as you were before?” He looked full of concern, and shaking his head, said, “No, no, Friday tell them to live good; tell them to pray God; tell them to eat corn-bread, cattle flesh, milk; no eat man again.”

Friday needs to get moving on that, because in a few years that entire nation will be exterminated. On the other hand, corn-bread is pretty good.

It’s one thing to be taught about modernism. You sit in high school English class and dutifully take notes: “Modernist literature was a break from the realism of the past and a movement towards symbolism and stream-of-consciousness, and a relaxation of previously-inviolate social conventions. [Scribbled unflattering caricature of teacher] [Anarchy symbol].”

It’s another thing to slog through eleven pre-20th century classics and then be confronted with unrepentant boozing, fucking and swearing — and that’s just the women. It’s weird to say, but I was almost offended by this book.

Of course Lady Chatterley is no Jane Eyre, either, but Chatterley is expressly about the war between the old and the new, set amidst the same indolent English gentry I recognized from the previous three hundred fictional years. In Gatsby, the new has been solidly victorious, and the characters naively assume that both the culture war and the world war is a thing of the past.

Once I got over my classics-induced prissiness (gay sex, for shame!), I really enjoyed the novel. It’s the only one I can truly say that about — where every page was simply enjoyable (as much as is possible when everyone in the book is broken and miserable). Part of it was that it’s so American. Henry James was my only other American author, but his book is set in Europe and populated largely by Europeans. Everyone in Gatsby talks like people I know, except that nobody I know says “old sport.” I guess that’s Jazz Age for “dawg.”

I didn’t watch the 1974 film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, because those people are too famous to ever believe as characters from a novel. Plus by now I had moved on to the 2006 book list, which meant three unbelievably painful months of Tristram Shandy, the book that no one but me has ever read.

Jane Austen’s oeuvre ends on kind of a downer note. Persuasion is no fairy-tale in which a tousled and damp Colin Firth rides in to whisk away a raven-haired, sharp-tongued young woman to his sprawling estate, winning her with acidic wit and brooding, needy glances from across the –

What was I saying? Oh yeah, Persuasion. It’s the wish-fulfillment of the older woman who thought she missed her only chance at love, not the pink-and-ponies bridal fantasy of Pride and Prejudice. This means it’s less fun to read. If I wanted to listen to women in their thirties complain they aren’t married, I’d watch Sex and the City. Austen is widely considered to have invented the romance novel, but in the case of Persuasion, we’re talking more like chick lit. And even Bridget Jones gets to make out with Colin Firth.

In a lot of Austen literature, the heroine is described as plainer than her sisters, friends or desirable cousins. Filmmakers then proceed to cast these roles with Kiera Knightley and Gwenyth Paltrow. Not so the BBC, which took seriously the descriptions of Anne Elliot in the first chapter: “faded and thin,” and “haggard.” In fact nearly everyone in the miniseries looks like they’re riding the Green Line at rush hour. This does not make for a sweeping period romance, but it might be an okay documentary that reminds me how nice it is to live in the 21st century where I’m allowed to have my own money and a job.

What made reading the book worthwhile is this exchange at the end, between Anne and a male friend on the subject of whether it is women or men who love longest and deepest. It was not part of the original ending. It feels, a little, like the words of an author who didn’t live long enough to see a future she might like too.

“Well, Miss Elliot,” (lowering his voice,) “as I was saying we shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman, would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you — all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

“Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”