Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is officially on my list of favorite books. I think my sister thought I was crazy when I was trying to tell her how funny the narrator was. All that stuff about what is expected of heroines and how it didn't apply to Catherine at all. I thought it was pretty funny how totally hard core Austen was beating up all the novel writers. It was like listening to someone's very well thought out tangents.
I like Catherine a lot. I hope I don't sound conceited or anything, but she was just like me, but a little more naive and cluesless. I probably would be at the same intelligence level if it wasn't for school, so I think we are fairly even. She is so nice and agreeable. I really respected her when she cleared up the whole mess about walk with the Tilneys in Chapter 12. It takes courage to apologize even when the error isn't your fault. Catherine may not be as smart as some of Austen's other heroines, but she is undeniably a good person and not nearly as stupid as many other characters. As soon as I read about Mr. Henry Tilney, I liked him. He is just the kind of guy I usually end up likeing. He's smart, funny and kind - in that order.
The only problem is that Catherine gets to be married at the age of eighteen. If I write a story about a teenager it is not going to end with everything working out for the boy/girl relationship. They ALWAYS end that way. I get sick of it. My life is not like that. Life can go on without having a boyfriend. Some books need to have that ending but I haven't found one that ends differently yet. It seems like the everyday, real-to-life books always end with the girl and the boy being together. Life is not alwasy like that for teenagers. So that bothers me a little in general.
Another thing I noticed is that all those seemingly random qoutes at the begining totally tie into the story and are all things that Catherine could have used knowing before hand. More proof of Jane Austen's great wit. I love how satirical the whole thing is, yet how well I relate to the main character.
I highly recomend this one. After all, if you like to read in general, I think you can appreciate Austen's mockery of novels and their writers, and if you don't like to read you won't care whether I recomend it or not.
But then again I'm probably "about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is."