Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin is an Australian writer and feminist who lived from 1879 to 1954. My Brilliant Career was published in 1901. Our fearless narrator and center of the story is Sybylla Melvyn. We are warned right away by Sybylla that she is egotistical and is not about to apologize for it. We are told not to fear “encountering such trash as descriptions of beautiful sunsets and whisperings of wind.” And, she tells us,

There is no plot in this story, because there has been none in my life or in any other life which has come under my notice. I am one of a class, the individuals of which have not time for plots in their life, but have all they can do to get their work done without indulging in such a luxury.

When a child her family was pretty well-off. Her father owned good property and a station that had lots of visitors on an almost daily basis. Sybylla was educated, taught to love books and reading, learned music and loved playing the piano. But then one day her father decides to sell everything and move the family to a new home and piece of property in Possum Gully. He was going to try his hand at sheep farming and was sure he would make a success of it.

But a success was not made. He eventually had to turn to dairying, a hard, never ending profession. They grew poorer and poorer and the debt got higher. Then the drought arrived and things got even worse. All of the children had to work on the dairy and Sybylla was not happy. No longer could they afford books and she was too exhausted for music, too exhausted for anything:

Weariness! Weariness! This was life–my life–my career, my brilliant career! I was fifteen–fifteen! A few fleeting hours and I would be old as those around me. I looked at them as they stood there, weary, and turning down the other side of the hill of life. When young, no doubt they had hoped for, and dreamed of, better things–had even known them. But here they were. This had been their life; this was their career. It was, and in all probability would be, mine too. My life–my career–my brilliant career! Weariness! Weariness!

She is a torment to her mother because she can’t keep her mouth closed about how unhappy she is. Sadly though, she doesn’t seem to recognize that her refined mother is very likely as miserable or more so than she is.

But a reprieve comes in the form of her grandmother and aunt. Sybylla is sent to stay with them for awhile. There she has access to books, music, cultured people, and is free to be young.

Sybylla is not a looker and always talks about how ugly she is, but while she might not be a beauty, her indomitable spirit and unconcern about all the things girls are supposed to care about is more attractive than she understands. But she also has some backwards ideas about men and what they like and who they should fall in love with and how a courtship should be conducted. This of course causes all kinds of misunderstandings. But Sybylla isn’t really interested in getting married either. She has no interest in settling down and doing what she is told by her husband.

Sybylla’s voice carries the narrative along at high speed from start to finish. She makes very astute observations about people and life and she is only ever herself no matter what happens. And a lot happens, not all of it good. The book did not end how I wanted it to though, but it wouldn’t have been right if it ended any other way. I mentioned before when I first started the book that is was liked Pride and Prejudice meets Jane Eyre in the Australian Outback. And it is in many respects. But it is also its own book too and like Sybylla it always stays true to itself.

So read this book. You’ll be glad you did.

Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, or T.S. for short, comes from a long line of Tecumseh Spivets. T.S. is a precocious twelve-year-old boy who lives on Coppertop Ranch in Montana. He is compelled to spend his time mapping everything. When he talks about maps, these aren’t just maps of land or places, but also maps of actions, facial expressions, blood cells, or sounds. For T.S., a map translates the unknown into the witnessed and the known:

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here ad there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

T.S. is so good at mapping that his illustrations have appeared in science magazines and even at the Smithsonian. And one day, the Smithsonian calls to tell him that he has been awarded the Baird Fellowship. They do not know he is only twelve.

T.S. finds himself in a dilemma. Does he tell the man on the phone that he is twelve or does he just show up? And if he shows up, how does he get there? He doesn’t feel as though he can tell his parents because he doesn’t think they will understand. His father is the practical, ranch owning and working sort, the kind of man for whom physical ability is important and other things just aren’t quite graspable. T.S.’s mother, Dr. Clair, is a scientist. She spends her time in search of a beetle that may or may not actually exist. There is also a teenage sister who is a pretty normal teenage girl. And there used to be a brother, Layton, a few years older than T.S., who died in a tragic accident just six months ago. T.S. feels the accident might have been his fault and in memory of his brother, hides “Layton” in all of his drawings.

T.S. decides he will just show up at the Smithsonian and tell no one. So one night he takes his suitcase and hops a freight train to Chicago. From Chicago he catches a ride with a trucker to D.C.. Of course much happens on his trip. This section of the book is also taken up with T.S. reading a notebook he stole from his mother. In the notebook he discovers the story of Emma Osterville, a precocious girl who is an ancestor of his mother’s. Emma became a scientist when women scientists were few. Emma’s is an interesting story but I haven’t been able to satisfactorily connect it to the rest of the book.

The Smithsonian is surprised to say the least that T.S. is only twelve. But they see an opportunity to exploit his youth and run with the story, making up more and more details and taking it ever further away from the truth. How it all ends, you’ll have to read it and find out for yourself.

At first the very adult voice of T.S. was rather disconcerting. Once I got used to it, I began to notice that while he talks knowingly about maps and science, he is still very much a boy who likes boy things and doesn’t understand as much about the world as he thinks he does. The marginal notes and drawings turned out to be fun little side trips of their own and, I thought, didn’t detract from the main story at all. The book got a little bogged down in the middle, just before he found the wormhole in the Midwest (I’ve been through that wormhole, it’s called “Iowa”), but once on the other side and in Chicago the story picks up again and speeds on to the end.

I very much enjoyed all of the musings about mapping, what maps do, how they help us see things and make connections, how they create their very own world that isn’t necessarily the same as the real world. I can honestly say I will not think of maps in the same way ever again.

Overall, the book is not amazing, but it is a very good read which has got to be worth something.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is the Slaves group read. Take a gander at what others think and follow or join in our discussion in the Slaves forum.

That makes that one odd highlight even odder to me then. Before reader number four could highlight it, it had to have been highlighted by three other people independently. As one mystery is solved, another is created. Why did those first three people highlight that short, half-sentence?

I do feel better knowing that highlights start out as independent. I still wonder though if after they begin appearing in the book whether subsequent readers are more likely to highlight them.

On a side note, on the Kindle forum I was digging through, a large number of people were freaked out at the prospect of their highlights showing up in the books of others. One poster noted that personal information is not attached to one’s highlights making it not much different than if you had underlined passages in a print book and then sold it to a used bookstore. Nonetheless, there was so much freaking out about invasion of privacy that a vigorous debate broke out with several individuals very upset that Amazon looked over their shoulders while they read. But as one clear-headed person pointed out, if you didn’t read the privacy policy when buying your Kindle, it is your own fault and you have no right to be upset. While I agree, I also understand not reading the fine print. After all it is written in the most boring legalese that will put off all put the most intrepid or paranoid reader.

Enough of Kindle highlights. While we are on the topic of e-books, did you see the piece in the Guardian today with Jonathan Franzen warning that ebooks are corroding values? He pretty much says that serious readers only read print books. Guess I’m not a serious reader. It is clear that Franzen learned nothing from the Oprah debacle which means the most fun part about the article is the comments where the snark flies fast and furious. Enjoy.

If you are a person who regularly reads the Jane Austen spin-off books and genuinely likes them, I suspect you will like Death Comes to Pemberley. If you are among those, like me, who do not like the spin-off books, then stay away from the one. The fact that it is by P.D. James, a very good writer and a fan of Jane Austen, does not save the book.

The book begins six years after Pride and Prejudice ends. Elizabeth and Darcy have two children and no verbal sparring matches. In fact Elizabeth seems to have lost her sharp tongue entirely and become a settled and proper married lady who runs the household at Pemberley with a firm but gentle hand and much good sense. Jane and Bingley live nearby, have a number of children and go on in their happy and easy going Jane and Bingley way. Colonel Fitzwilliam is vying for the hand of Georgiana but she is in love with a newly invented character, Alveston, who is much closer to her own age. Everything goes on in a very proper way with feelings very properly hidden so there is nary a ripple in the very proper pond.

Until Lydia and Wickham show up and Mr. Denny is murdered in the woods of Pemberley and Wickham the apparent murderer. While this ruffles Darcy’s feathers and Elizabeth’s on behalf of Darcy, the pond still manages to stay so calm that the ripple caused by this unexpected event could have merely come from a passing breeze.

When the murderer finally confesses, my reaction was, huh? Followed immediately by, that’s dumb. And then as everything gets sorted out and slotted into place I got mad about something that I don’t believe a particular character would do even as an interesting and creative connection between that character and another was made. But that interesting bit was small and very late in coming and comes nowhere close to making up for the book as a whole.

I suppose Jane Austen spin-offs do two things. One, they indicate how popular Jane Asuten still is even after all these years and hopefully the popularity has introduced even more readers to Austen’s work. Two, these non-Austen books prove time and time again just what a brilliant novelist Austen is because none of the spin-offs can come even close to being a real Jane Austen novel. And unless Jane Austen herself writes a new novel, I will never, ever read another spin-off again.

An observation. Kindle has the option to view the highlights other readers have made within the book on my Kindle while I am reading. I have this feature turned on because I find it fascinating to see what other people thought interesting and worth noting while they read. About the time I was reading Bleak House on my Kindle last summer I began to notice that people tend to highlight the same passages. Was this just because the passages were recognized as important by multiple readers? Or was there something else going on?

I’ve kept my observing eye open over the months, and it just seemed more and more bizarre that I would run across passages that indicated “highlighted by four Kindle users” or five or six but never just “one.” So I began to wonder, do people reading on their Kindle with the view other reader’s highlights turned on tend to underline a passage because someone else has already done so? Does a reader think, a couple other people thought this passage was important so I should underline it too?

I decided no, it was just coincidence. Until today. As I was reading a A More Perfect Heaven this morning I again noticed that the same passages were highlighted by multiple people. I dismissed it as coincidence until I reached this passage:

equant—in effect a second axis of rotation, off-center from the true axis.

This half, out of context, nonsensical incomplete sentence was highlighted by six Kindle users. Six! Since I read this today I know the context, but by next week or by the time I finish the book, if I saw that in my highlights I would have no idea what it was talking about. Why would six people highlight this?

The only thing I can think of to explain it is that one person highlighted it and then the next person thought they should highlight it too and then because two people highlighted it the third person thought it should be highlighted, and so on until it has accumulated six highlights. For the record, I did not highlight it.

No longer am I able to excuse as coincidence the tendency for the same passages to be highlighted by so many people. I find this sheep-like behavior in highlighting to be a bit disturbing. I would expect some overlap between readers but nothing this consistent. Does it stem from lazy reading? Or maybe a certain lack of reading confidence? Or perhaps people are afraid of looking stupid by highlighting the “wrong” passages so highlight the same ones others before them have?

When I read on my Kindle I highlight a lot, much more than I would if I were reading a print book. I do this because I can’t page back through my Kindle when I am done looking for a passage that was on the left hand side of the page near the bottom about a quarter of the way through the book somewhere in chapter four or five. So if there is a fact or interesting tidbit I think I might want to know for later when I am blogging about the book I highlight it. As a result, the number of highlights for A More Perfect Heaven has already grown since I began reading it and a good many of my highlights have not been highlighted by others. I plan to keep an eye on the highlights for this book to see if people who read it after me begin highlighting any of my highlights. I’ll let you know if there are any interesting observations to be made.