Jane Austen Book Club + Italiano!

My newest read, Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, is pretty good so far. I am enjoying it because it is about a group of people who all love Jane Austen and sit around and discuss her books.

Here a summary:

"In California's Central Valley, five women and one man join together to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens.
With her finely sighted eye for frailties of human behavior and her finely tuned ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier, or her characters more appealing, while the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious -- or so much fun.
Dedicated Austen readers will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through this novel, but many readers will simply enjoy the vision that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of sublime social comedy. This is the novel that Jane Austen might indeed have written had she lived in twenty-first-century California."

Now, while I don't agree this author is in any way a modern day Jane Austen or that she is even the teensiest bit worthy of the comparison (I hold Ms. Austen in the highest regards, if you haven't noticed), I'll agree while only a few chapters into it, I am finding references to Jane Austen's books and characters -- especially Emma.

I heard the movie based on this book was dreadful. And while I haven't seen it yet, I can almost guarantee that the book is better, as all books are. So if you've seen the movie and barfed silently through it, give the book a chance. Maybe it will get rid of that taste in your mouth. Because really, you should never leave anything associate with Ms. Austen feeling that way, I don't care what Mark Twain says. That's not even his real name anyway.

P.S. We are only 3 days into our Italian lessons and already I am amazed by how much we know. Our vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds every day. Pretty soon we'll actually be able to have real conversations instead of just sitting around asking each other's names, saying where we live, and spelling random words. I'm excited to actually make sense.