Book review: Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

eating disorder tw, also spoilers

Can you believe it took me this long to read Bridget Jones's Diary? I did just barely buy it from the thrift store on Wednesday of last week, and read it yesterday! Aren't you proud of me?  I think this is the OG modern retelling of Pride & Prejudice. Amazon summary:

Bridget Jones's Diary is the devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud account of a year in the life of a thirty-something Singleton on a permanent doomed quest for self-improvement. Caught between the joys of Singleton fun, and the fear of dying alone and being found three weeks later half eaten by an Alsatian; tortured by Smug Married friends asking, "How's your love life?" with lascivious, yet patronizing leers, Bridget resolves to: reduce the circumference of each thigh by 1.5 inches, visit the gym three times a week not just to buy a sandwich, form a functional relationship with a responsible adult and learn to program the VCR. With a blend of flighty charm, existential gloom, and endearing self-deprecation, Bridget Jones's Diary has touched a raw nerve with millions of readers the world round. 

This book felt like a grown-up version of the Georgia Nicholson books (Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, etc.), another series of English girl dating diary-style books. Bridget has the same desperation, the same despondent belief that she is fat and ugly, the same tight group of friends with their own relationship problems, and nearly the same naivety towards men as Georgia, and the latter is fourteen. What's different is that Bridget's anxieties are of the 30-something "I'm going to die alone/men are trash" variety, her friend group includes a Gay Best Friend, and her negative body image veers towards an eating disorder. Adult women are supposed to eat between 1600 and 2400 calories a day, yet Bridget aims for 700 daily calories, and beats herself up if she eats 1200. She frequently calls herself fatphobic names, has a photographic memory of how many calories every kind of food has (this is remarkable because she can't remember her times table or anything else having to do with numbers), and once flees an attempted tryst with a younger man because he presses down on her stomach and says "squashy" in a non-negative way (weird, but not mean). Bridget also strongly reminds me of the Shopaholic series' main character, due to how much I wanted to shake her (they're so annoying and need to grow up!!).

I also would not say Bridget is self aware, as the book summary does. She's way too hard on herself in the looks department and thinks she's fat even though she's not, while she doesn't realize how hard she's making her own life. She also deflates whenever anyone is mean or overbearing, and doesn't know how to set boundaries with people. I was similarly boy-obsessed, despairing when they ignored me, and certain I was fat and always trying to diet in my twenties, but Bridget's in her thirties and is acting like a 19 year old.

In short, Bridget bears no resemblance to Lizzy Bennet. Lizzy would have stood up to the fatphobic catty model-types and said something witty and biting to them. Lizzy wouldn't have slept with her boss even though she knew he didn't want to be in a relationship (Bridget did call him out a few times, but was still really gullible). Lizzy wouldn't have cared what weight or size she was. Lizzy wouldn't have fretted over men or dying alone. Lizzy wouldn't have put up with many of Bridget's so-called "friends"' behavior, and she would have handled the Smug Marrieds' nosy questions better, possibly even making them feel they had behaved badly. She also doesn't have any banter with Darcy. Bridget is a disappointment in that sense. You have to see this book as a completely different work than Pride & Prejudice.

Mark Darcy was handled pretty well, I thought. I was surprised to see that his and Bridget's relationship wasn't the typical "hate to love"/wits clashing kind of dynamic that you often see. Bridget's and Mark's family friends keep trying to push them together, but Bridget thinks Mark is a dork, and Mark thinks she's attractive but that she's not into him. They obviously get together in the end, although you don't really know why. Bridget is so immature and has so many neuroses and low self esteem that you're not sure what Mark sees in her, apart from his comment that he was tired of dating airbrushed, plastic women and wanted someone real. You also get the feeling Bridget gets with Mark mainly because she likes the attention and doesn't want to be single anymore. Her finally having a boyfriend is the triumph, not their being in love. To be honest, this book dwelt way too much on the Wickham character, Bridget's boss, than on Mark Darcy.

I thought it was a stroke of genius that the Mrs. Bennet and Lydia characters were compounded into one, Bridget's mum. She gets a midlife crisis and a Portuguese lover, to Bridget's horror, and the scandal Darcy has to help with is a timeshare scam. I thought she was pretty well-written: self-involved, self-absorbed, selfish, obsessed with fixing Bridget up with somebody, totally embarrassing. I also thought Bridget was way too much of a doormat with her, always doing what she wanted.

The other characters are nearly unrecognizable to their P&P counterparts, or nonexistent. Bridget's dad is a racist cuckhold who weeps and mopes about when his wife leaves him (he always calls the Portuguese lover a w*p when railing against him). Mr. Bennet would have been like, good riddance if his wife left him. Mary Bennet's part may have been played by Bridget's man-hating (but not a lesbian) friend? I already mentioned that Bridget's hot but flaky boss was the Wickham character, but he also had a dash of Mr. Collins, in the sense that he married someone else and it blindsided Bridget.

I know I've been ragging on this book a lot, and deservedly so, but I still enjoyed it for what it was. I read this at the end of a very long day, and it was the perfect read for that. I'd recommend this book if you want to read all of the Jane Austen retellings or if you like chick lit, especially British chick lit, and have a high tolerance for romcom Single Girl shenanigans.

I want to read the other books, but will get them from the library rather than buying them. I'd also like to see the movies.

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: May 12
From: thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: idk, probably giving away

Book review: Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen

Ok everybody, you know the words to this one: I picked up this British cozy mystery at the thrift store. It was intriguing because the heroine was royalty (daughter of a duke) and in line for the throne, but she's also a spy. Summary from the back of the book:

My ridiculously long name is Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie. [Despite being] thirty-fourth in line for the throne, I am, as they say, flat broke. When my brother, Binky, cut off my meager allowance, I bolted from Scotland--and my engagement to Fishface (I mean, Prince Siegfried)--for London, where I have:

a) built a fire in the hearth--entirely on my own, thank you very much

b) fallen for an absolutely unsuitable Irish peer

c) made a few quid housekeeping incognita, and 

d) been summoned by the Queen herself to spy on her playboy son.

Less than thrilled with this last bit, I'm wondering what to do when an arrogant Frenchman--who was trying to swipe our family estate!--winds up dead in my bathtub. Now, my new job is to clear my very long family name...

A note of clarification: Georgie did not leave Scotland because her brother stopped giving her an allowance; she bolted because the Queen "requested" her brother and his wife host a party where Prince Fishface would attend, with the aim of getting Georgie engaged to him. Georgie was like hell no and peaced out. Also, for the "fallen for [...] an Irish peer" part, she was just attracted to him but felt he was too dashing and handsome for her to trust. They do get closer as the book goes on. Also, "family name" refers to the surname, such as Windsor, not her super long name with all the middle names. I mean. That's elementary stuff. 

 Ok, so despite the silliness of the title (it sounds like a middle-grade book about a princess who's a spy), I enjoyed this book. I did feel that there were probably quite a few anachronisms (it's set in the early 1930s), such as Georgie's worldly friend talking about sex all the time, and Georgie being close to her Cockney working-class grandfather and being willing to clean despite being nobility, and errors with all the royalty and peer stuff, but luckily I don't know a huge amount about that, so I was able to enjoy the book. I felt that Georgie did too much sighing out loud for a Lady, but whatever. There were a lot of characters, but I didn't really have any trouble keeping them straight.The mystery was pretty good and kept me guessing, although I had my theories.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes cozy mysteries set in the British Isles, or historical fiction in the same location about royalty and gentry, but not to anyone who's really studied this, because I feel that the errors and anachronisms would make them pitch a fit. I'm going to try to track down the others from the library (it's the first in a series).

Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: April 17
From: thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: probably giving away

Book review: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

I decided to reread Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw after I saw that one of my friends was reading it on Instagram, and she has the same copy as me. This is a play, which was so successful that it was turned into a musical and then one of the favorite movies of my childhood, starring Audrey Hepburn. The play is called Pygmalion instead of My Fair Lady because it references the ancient Greek myth, about a sculptor named Pygmalion who carved a statue of his dream woman, which was brought to life by Aphrodite because she was moved he fell in love with the statue? IDK. Obligatory Amazon summary, because I am lazy:

Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence. 

The play is very much like My Fair Lady, except that there are no songs and Eliza marries Freddy at the end and they run a struggling flower shop. Freddy's family and Henry Higgins' mother play a greater role: a sort of parlor party? at Mrs. Higgins' house is where Eliza first tries out her high-class lady act and ends up just saying colorful/shocking language in a posh accent. In the movie, they go to Ascot so Audrey Hepburn can wear an (admittedly iconic) enormous hat and a tight dress. Also, the big to-do where Eliza has to prove her Lady-ness to Professor Higgins' former student is a garden party in the play and a ball in the movie. In the rambling epilogue, we also learn about Freddy's sister and how she learns socialism or something. I didn't really care.

I found the play very quick, despite its various ramblings about class (understandable) and H.G. Wells for some reason. Obviously besides the makeover aspect, my favorite thing about this play is the linguistics. I think My Fair Lady set me up to love linguistics, which I have found fascinating ever since I took a linguistics class in college. I will say that Henry Higgins is very classist and does not recognize that all British English dialects are valid and there is no right one that is 'correct'. This is a good book for English and linguistics students to read in order to see the racist attitudes behind diction classes and linguistic imperialism, etc. Despite all this, I did kind of find Eliza's Cockney rather hard to read, as it's written down phonetically. If you hate dialects in books, I would skip this.

At some point Henry Higgins calls himself and the Colonel "a couple of confirmed bachelors" and that makes the play make more sense. Of course two gay guys would give a girl a makeover and judge everything about her harshly and just kind of... not super care about her future. I feel like most straight men of that era would have been like, "well, if you can't figure out what to do with your life I'll have to marry you since I'm responsible for you." There's a whole song in My Fair Lady where Henry Higgins basically says he'd rather slit his throat than get married to a woman. That's gay proof for you.

I like this play but have decided to give it away since I just have way too many books and some of them have got to go. I would recommend this book if you like My Fair Lady or linguistics or late 19th/early 20th century English class dynamics, etc.

This has nothing to do with the book, but in My Fair Lady Freddy is played by an absolute dreamboat who I have just learned last night was actually young Jeremy Brett, the most iconic Sherlock Holmes!!!!! I was SHOOK.

The above image is the cover that my copy has, and it shows Eliza as a flower girl in the beginning of the book. It's ok. I think maybe the small woman floating above the title is Eliza as a Lady maybe? idk. The only bad Pygmalion covers are the ones who depict her as a flapper or some other anachronism, or who use a Klimt painting as the cover.

Score: 3.9 out of 5 stars
Read in: end of May
From: the thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away

Book review: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

I picked up The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro because some blogger I read said it was good. It won the Man Booker Prize in 1989, and Mr. Ishiguro, who is Japanese-English, has won the Nobel Prize in literature. I thought it sounded interesting, and thought I'd give it a try. Here is the Amazon summary:

...Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

TRotD is very well written, and it's clear Mr. Ishiguro is a master of his craft. I thought the prose quite dense, however. Unless you've read a ton of 19th and 20th century British literature and/or are very familiar with the Downton Abbey or Jeeves and Wooster miniseries, a lot of this book will be hard to read and not make a lot of sense to you. You really need to have that early modern English class-obsessed culture and servitude knowledge.

[SPOILERS, I guess] One sub?plot of the book not touched upon in the Amazon blurb is Stevens' relationship with Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. The butler and housekeeper were the heads of the service staff, and as such generally had a closer working and possibly friendly relationship. While Stevens is the narrator and we see everything through his uptight and uber-professional viewpoint, it's clear that Miss Kenton has a crush on Stevens, what with bringing him flowers "to cheer up his room" and arguing with him in a flouncy Austen-heroine manner. Nothing happens between them as Stevens is so emotionally constipated because he thinks that's what a butler should be like, to the extent that he's too afraid of neglecting his duties to properly say goodbye to his dying father. Miss Kenton got engaged in an attempt to awaken jealousy in Stevens, and when it didn't work, she married the dude anyway even though she didn't love him. Stevens and Mrs. Benn meet up many years later and reminisce about the past. Stevens made the trip in hopes that she'll leave her husband (since she sounded unhappy in her letters to him) and they can work together again at Darlington Hall. However, this doesn't happen, making disappointment one of the major themes of the book (besides emotional constipation and love of class separateness). In one of the saddest lines of the book, Stevens says that he gave so much of himself to Lord Darlington that he doesn't think he has anything more to give to his current employer, a rich American Anglophile. [end spoilers]

Plot-wise, most of the action is emotional and philosophical. Nothing much really happens, so this book is recommended only for people who care more about feelings and history than action. This book was really sad but worth reading, probably. If it sounds like you'll be into it, give it a try.

The cover art above is really for the movie, which starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. My copy had the same cover as a movie tie-in. Most of the covers for TRotD seem to have clocks, sundials, and hourglasses, due to the theme of time lost/gone by. A lot of covers have old fancy cars and show parts of headless butlers standing at attention.

Score: 3.9 out of 5 stars
Read in: mid May
From: the library booksale
Format: paperback
Status: giving away