🇺🇸 Read: Natalie Jenner: The Jane Austen Society

 This book came with high recommendation from Modern Mrs. Darcy, and I totally agree with her.

The book is set shortly after World War II, in Chawton, UK.

Never heard about it? It was the village where Jane Austen lived the last years of her life. Though in the 1950s, Jane Austen wasn’t quite the super star she is today, a few of the villagers really love her books and find peace and solace in reading them over and over again:

There is Florence Knight, a real descendant of Jane Austen’s brother, a spinster in her 50s, terrorized by her  old father.

Adam, a farmer and village aid, still living with his spiteful mother

Dr. Benjamin Grey, the village physician who lost his beloved wife and their daughter

Andrew Forester, the town solicitor, who knows what the fate of the Knight estate will be,

Adeline, the former village school teacher, pregnant with her first child, who’s husband died in the war,

Evie, a maid in the Knight household, who had to leave school at age 14, but who really loves books, and,

Mimi, a Hollywood actress with a great passion for Jane Austen, who stops by to visit the last place she lived.

This diverse group of women and men, poor and wealthy bonds over their common love for Jane Austen and their shared goal to preserve her memory. 

Life doesn’t mean to well with either of them in the trying times after the war, and, like in true Jan Austen manner, one or the other may find love and  compassion in rather unexpected ways.

While the story line is entertaining and interesting enough, this is also a book about book lovers and the joy of reading and finding likeminded people who love the same books. 

I read this book as an audio and loved the narration, too.

🇺🇸 Read: Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld (audio book)

 Do you know this idea, that, every time we make a decision, a door opens and another one closes? And that there are endless universes, that take a different path, depending on these decisions you made?

this is a book that explores that idea.

What if Hillary, whom we know as Hillary Clinton, would have decided to end her relationship to her cheating boyfriend, and would have lived on as 

This is a very interesting book, following the steps on a pretty average American woman born in the 1940s, coming of age in the 60s, going to college and then on to law school.

New and more opportunities for women, but also the traditional hurdles and questions: following my career aspirations or marrying and stepping back to support my husband?

We all know how it ended in real life: While she made it into the White House, she was not the president. Had to live through the public humiliation of her husbands “not having sexual relations with that woman” (*) .But would have her path ended in the Oval Office had she ditched Bill Clinton early on?

Curtis Sittenfeld imagines that she would have lived a public life as a politician anyway. And much of the criticism she faced in real life would have been thrown at her anyways as well. Her and Bill Clintons paths would have crossed over and over again, and anything that had been held against her because of her husband, would have been held against her because she might not have been his wife as well. A nasty woman always stays a nasty woman, no matter if she is a spinster, a wife, a mother, nun or president. How dare she. While imagining the big “what if’, Curtis Sittenfeld doesn’t turn her into a Saint, she always stays realistically, loyal and opportunistic, idealistic and pragmatic, relatable.

I quite enjoyed listening to this book, and the narrator did a tremendous job with the voicing of the different characters. I also loved how real life events, speeches facts were tweaked to fit the narration. 

(*) Since the beginning of the #metoo movement I thought a lot about Monica Lewinsky and what she went through. This affair was of course also discussed in Germany with a slight irritation about why the question where the president gets his sex is that important for American politics. In Germany, this would have never been the scandal that it was in the US.

Now, 30 years later, I have a hard time to believe we took no offense at all that  the - arguably- most powerful man in the western world took advantage of a young, inexperienced intern. And then, in the end, instead of being recognized as a victim of sexual harassment and working place harassment, she becomes the laughing stock of the world. With the first thing a lot of people saying: she isn’t even  pretty. 

She got bullied in every media outlet worldwide, ridiculed and violated over and over again. It was okay for a man to use a young woman as a toy and throw her away after using her. He should have been punished. Not for lying, but for exploitation. For being a sexual predator and offender.  And shame on all of us for not siding with the victim, but continuing the abuse.