So I’ve been just living at the beach and focused on my studies.
Wake up with the sun, take a long walk on the beach, and get back to the van before the heat and UV get really intense. Breakfast, faff around with the solar, etc, then hit the beach again around 10:30 to do some work! Reading, watching lectures, writing, listening to audiobooks.
Solar noon is after 2pm, and by then I’m safely back in the van to get lunch. I hide from the sun, maybe take a nap, move the solar panel, do some more work, you get the picture.
And I have to say that Pride and Prejudice is the most utterly boring tedious rubbish I have ever read! I’ve never bothered with it in the past because in my mind it is always been in the same category as Sex and the City or those awful BBC period dramas. There’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just not made for me.
We live in a diverse world full of people who like different things, thankfully. We can all have our own tastes and preferences without having to judge anyone else. So please don’t judge me when I say that I’m not interested in this book.
The basic premise of the story has no interest for me. Even if it was set in modern times I would not care at all about young women looking for husbands. But the book is over 200 years old, and set in a world that no longer exists and was never relevant to the majority of people. It’s about elites, spoiled rich girls trying to preserve their social status, I can’t get invested in these characters. And since I don’t care about the characters or their ambition, there is no pleasure to be had in their conversations. All I see is overly formal, clumsy, florid prose.
Nobody talks like that today, it’s not an example of good writing. Sure, the structure maybe a great example of how to build a novel, the information content of individual lines and paragraphs might be tremendously powerful. But it’s such fucking hard work to learn these lessons that all my effort is spent just plowing through the actual words, I have no time for the stuff I’m supposed to be actually learning.
But English departments of universities seem to employ exclusively women, the very same demographic that Jane Austen was writing for and the BBC is targeting with its TV adaptations. If I don’t like this shit then that’s my problem, the decisions are made by people who do.