I've been taking this awesome 18th and 19th century English novel tutorial and I've been reading (and writing an essay on) a different novel each week. So far I've read Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Richardson's Pamela, Fielding's Joseph Andrews, and Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest.

Those were all pretty good and I would recommend them to anyone with some time to spare. They make very good rainy day reading, especially The Romance of the Forest. It's a great suspense/thriller!

As much as I liked those previous novels, we've finally arrived at the one I have been looking forward to the most: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility! I have been in love with Austen's work since high school. I read Pride and Prejudice a few times (and the ending alone, a few dozen times)! I also read Persuasion, which is a fairly different love story from Pride and Prejudice. It's a love that, in many ways, I think is much more complex and certainly filled with more longing. Good stuff.

Now I'm really excited to read Sense and Sensibility for the first time. I've wanted to read it since I saw the Ang Lee film version with Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, and Hugh Grant.

It's also the perfect kind of reading weather here in Oxford. It's chilly, cloudy, and rainy-- just the right condition to make you want to snuggle up under the covers with a good book!