You were AD the year before me, I guess. I came in with Siddhartha and Remains of the Day my sophomore year.

I did that year too. The Remains of the Day is my default favorite book. I read that one three times too and discovered something new each time. I medaled in Essay a few times, I think, both years. And I've got some good anecdotes about them, too. For my Jane Eyre essay, I don't even remember what my thesis was, but I made up the ending to this book called Pest Control that I'd picked up in a supermarket one time (I must have been comparing modern storytelling to old-time storytelling for some reason). I figured the judges wouldn't have read the book anyway.

The best, though, is that one afternoon, my AD advisor and I struck up a conversation about the different meanings of the title of The Remains of the Day. We were just talking after school; I don't remember why the topic came up. I'd never really thought about it, but we came up with some interesting ways to interpret the title.

Guess what one of the essay prompts at Regionals was?

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I read Jane Eyre when I was 12, as the only person who actually read in the middle school elective class called Reading for Pleasure. I loved it quite a lot, and just started re-reading it myself, actually.

I forgot we were having this conversation. I adore Jane Eyre. I read it the first time at 12 or so, too -- my mom had gorgeous oversized hardcovers with woodcut illiustrations from childhood, of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, which was one of the draws. (I didn't read Wuthering Heights until later, though.)

I never found Jane whiny. Given her circumstances, I loved the fact that she stood up to Aunt Georgina, and to the horrible teacher at Lowood. I think she was surprised by her feelings for Rochester, which would have been distressing at that time, again given their very different circumstances and the things that had been said about her all her life. Her arc may have been melodramatic (and yeah, I wanted to smack St. John, and thought that section of the book could have been cut by a lot) but she learned to love and respect herself by the end of the book.

I also read crit about it years ago that theorized Helen was the super ego, Jane the ego, and Bertha the id. It was in a book called Madwoman in the Attic, I believe. Really interesting.

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I read Jane Eyre, but it's been so long, I disremember anything but that she was a governess, and Mr. Rochester. I think it was beyond my understanding, when I read it.

The Remains of the Day is my default favorite book.

Oh, gorgeous, gorgeous book. I was afraid to see the movie after I read it, because I loved the book, so.

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The Remains of the Day is my default favorite book.

I loved the movie, and I've been meaning to read the book because of it.

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Cindy, I liked the movie, but I cannot love it because it changes something in the book that I just cannot fathom. You know that scene when Ms. Kensington is crying in her room because she's going to leave to get married? And Stevens stands outside her door and listens to her crying, but he doesn't go in? Because that is prime Stevens: inactive, unable to do anything? He just listens. Well, in the movie, HE GOES IN THE FUCKING ROOM. There's so much good about the movie, and of course Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are fab, but gah, I can't get over a change where they make the character do the exact opposite of what he does in the book. Sort of like the people who don't like Faramir's characterization in the LOTR movies.

Also, there are stupid symbolic doves at the end.

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See, I can't even remember that. I'm not good at retaining plots of either movies or books that I don't re-watch/re-read obsessively. I do remember not hating the movie and being glad of it, but as you indicate, that probably had a lot to do with Hopkins (LOVE) and Thompson.

I completely forget the doves thing.

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Hopkins (LOVE)

Seriously. It's like he was made for that role. He and Thompson fit their characters pretty perfectly.

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I have nothing to add on Austen, but have to say--whee, Academic Decathlon! I was forever bitter that my freshman and sophomore years, the team went to nationals, but my junior and senior years, despite my best efforts (I medaled at state!) we placed *second* at state. Sigh.

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my junior and senior years, despite my best efforts (I medaled at state!) we placed *second* at state. Sigh.

Aw! I don't remember we as a team actually placed at State; our real goal was only to beat our rival school...and I don't even remember if we did that. But I think I got a Silver in Essay at State one year.

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Anyway, with mounting frustration at how dry my book has been thus far (and, hell, I don't even want to read it at this point), I decided to start rewriting it today with a faux-pompous tongue-in-cheek approach that I hope other people (such as, say, my editor, publisher, comrades, and player-haters) might also find fun. Continuum has been pretty lenient with the other writers, and I hope to enjoy some of that leniency. At the very least, I hope they don't sue me for smart-assery. What's your take, David?

Mi compadre! I had a similar epiphany last week where I was casting about for a voice that would tie together all the disparate bits and give focus to the much notes, and came up with a kind of unreliable narrator with issues. Which turned out to be the right idea, but too broad and I refined it a lot today and narrowed in on the tone which really makes a huge difference in a project like this.

I also just allowed myself the room to invent some stuff so it wouldn't get dry. (For example I just wrote up a fist fight between Doris Lessing and Kingsley Amis as a parenthetical side note.) I probably won't keep a lot of those things in the final edit but by giving myself that permission, the writing becomes livelier and more engaging to me (and by extension, the reader as well. I hope.)

At one point I was shooting for a narrative voice sort of like early sixties American literature: Pynchon, Hawkes, Barth. That's still a useful reference point (because they're all in some ways post-Beat - like Tom - and tonally I think their work is closer to Swordfishtrombones than anything else I know), but I was getting something closer to Woody Allen's loopy, bent intellectual 70s New Yorker pieces. (Not really comparing myself to Woody, of course, but if you've ever read his piece about The Lost Generation in Paris then you'll have some notion of how I came up with Doris Lessing and Kingsley Amis having a punchout, while Philip Larkin eggs them on.)

Anyway, I'm glad you've thrown off the shackles of your oppressive work and are now hacking at it with more glee. That's basically what I'm doing as well.

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