ThoughtfulChaos

I am currently reading Freakonomics and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Freakonomics is an interesting book authored Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. They take seemingly disparate events and draw causal relationships or parallels between them. The authors 'explore the hidden side of everything' by finding patterns in the data associated with some phenomenon and arrive at unexpected often startling conclusions. However towards the end I got a little bored and I have kept the book on hold for now. Meanwhile I started reading Pride and Prejudice (P&P).

I had very high expectations from P&P. Many of friends had recommended it as a good classic and I often find this particular book on the favourites lists of many people.

But I am not enjoying P&P much. The basic plot is quite boring and predictable. There is not much to make you think. The style of writing also puts me off. The book is in old style English with tons of semi-colons and long winding sentences. Often I have to reread an entire sentence or paragraph from the beginning because I have lost track of what it is trying to say by the time I reach its end.

I had seen the movie Bride and Prejudice couple of months ago and that makes the book even less appealing. The book and the movie have very similar characters and storyline. I used to think that the name of the movie was just a pun on the novel's title and was expecting only superficial similarities. But guess what... even the names of some of the main characters are identical.

The movie is actually an excellent transposition of the book. In the book the characters are from early 18th century whereas the movie is set up in the modern day. Gurinder Chadha has done fastforwarding very skillfully and I enjoyed the movie much more than I am enjoying the book right now.

I am still to complete the book. I will probably do that this weekend. Maybe there is more interesting stuff to come and I might like it when I have read it completely. Maybe.