Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

Rather than reading this classic, I listened to it on about 16 CDs over several weeks on the train to and from work. I'd heard of Jane Eyre, of course, and had watched a movie version, so the general sweep of the story wasn't a surprise to me. But it's the sort of dense, description heavy book that I avoid reading, knowing that I'll skim read sections, and spoil the book.

I'd never listened to an audio book before, and I loved this one. Listening to someone read to me means that I get swept up in Bronte's lengthy passages on the weather sweeping across the moors, rather than skimming past them to get to the action. I found my writing altered a little while I was doing my listening - it was more formal and structured, just like the voice I listened to for two hours a day. It was a great experience, and I loved knitting away on the train as Jane gradually fell in love with Mr Rochester.

I loved the Gothic, throbbing romance of the story, and its dramatic ebb and flow. And Jane, of course - Jane is a wonderful character. So determined and independent, that despite growing a little weary of her emotional highs and lows towards the end, I still felt greatly affectionate towards her.

I rather surprised myself in enjoying this book so much. I mean, it's esentially a romance story - an enormously dramatic romance, but still a romance. And I've never been interested in romance stories - I find it rather dull when the process of two people falling in love is the entire focus of the novel, and you know they're going to get together in the end, because that's the whole point. But perhaps I've been reading bad romance novels. Because all those criticisms apply to Jane Eyre, and it's still wonderful.

I imagine that people have written reams on the underlying themes and meanings of Jane Eyre, and I can't possibly add to that. It was just a wonderful story, with great pace, and a heroine who has stuck in my mind, dark and small, walking away down a country path with Mr Rochester striding beside her.

Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi)

This is the July book for our book club discussion, and it went down well with our group of feminists. Reading Lolita in Tehran is ostensibly a book about a book club, women meeting in Tehran to discuss Western literature. However, the group is not a book club in the usual sense, but a group of selected students of University lecturer Nafisi, and the discussions take place under her guidance. Her notes and recollections of these discussions make up roughly half of the book, but the other half contains Nafisi's (and her students) experiences of the Iranian revolution.

Not knowing a great deal about Iranian history, I found that Reading Lolita sometimes jumped time too abruptly for me, and I would be momentarily lost, trying to figure out what was happening now. On a second reading, however, the narrative flowed much more smoothly - incredibly dense and layered, it's certainly a book that benefits from a second reading.

Nafisi spends a lot of time trying to make sense of her restricted life in Tehran using fictional stories. What I like most in Reading Lolita, I think, is the discussions on the books. The only books I'd read that were discussed were The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice (although my idea of Pride and Prejudice is very influenced by the BBC drama, which I saw before reading the book), but I enjoyed just as much reading about characters that I've never come across before. Reading Lolita made me want to read Henry James and Nabokov.

In fact, I think that I felt closer to the books in this story than the women. The characters of the women were revealed, in a way, by how they reacted to the books, and in the end, I felt like I'd learned more about the books. I love stories with so much to them that they reveal more every time you read them, and I'm looking forward to reading Reading Lolita again in a few months. In the meantime, I should probably attempt to plunge into Henry James.