It feels like ages since I've last reported in on this thread ... I've had some really busy times at work (and as I work from home, that tends to mean late nights and not a lot of reading time), so my reading has been considerably slower in March than I'd like.
Anyway, I followed up the interminable slog that was
Red Mars with
Salt of the Earth by Trudi Canavan - the newest instalment in the Doctor Who short stories Time Trips series. I'm not convinced it was a brilliant story, but it featured my absolute favourite Doctor (Three), one of my favourite companions (Jo) and was pretty decent, so I was happy. Definitely my favourite in the Time Trips series so far.
And after that I read
Killer Frost - the sixth and final book in Jennifer Estep's YA urban fantasy Mythos Academy series. It's a series that I've been intensely frustrated with, mostly due to the writing (the author is incredibly fond of repetition, from endless recaps to using and re-using and overusing the same words and phrases throughout a book) but that also kept me entertained enough to go on reading.
I can't say I was blown away by this final book, but I felt it a fitting ending to the series.
Finally, and as part of my endeavour to cut down on my ent-corpse TBR piles, I picked up Joanna Trollope's modernised retelling of
Sense and Sensibility, the first release in the "Austen Project" series of retellings by current well-known authors.
Sense and Sensibility is my favourite Austen book, so I was both curious and somewhat wary. I'm not really sure what the
purpose of these modernised retellings is - Joanna Trollope's book was basically a straight retelling set in the 21st century, sticking as close to the plot and characters of the original as the modernisation allowed - but I've read my fair share of fanfic based on the same concept (moving the plot and characters of a book into a different era) before, so I wasn't particularly prejudiced or predisposed to hate it.
Spoiler:
I think - all in all - Trollope did a fair job. I found it a bit hard to suspend disbelief over the central premise (a family of four intelligent and educated upper middle class women, three of them adults, with a mere £200,000 in the bank, wailing about poverty and becoming homeless and not really knowing what to do about jobs or not keen on finding any, just doesn't strike me as likely in England around 2013 - or if it does, I wouldn't be inclined to feel a lot of sympathy for them!), but once I got over that, there was a lot to like about the book.
Granted, most of the things I liked about the book came straight from Austen anyway...
I also felt the book lacked a lot of Austen's subtle humour, which is one of my favourite things about her novels. But it was competently written, and the modernisation felt fairly balanced to me, not going too much overboard but also taking some risks - I've seen some reviewers complain about the occasional use of swear words, the lack of God in the characters' lives, and the idea that pre-marital sex isn't viewed as anything particularly immoral, but all that struck me as completely reasonable given that these are modern young people.
All in all, I'd rate it three stars as opposed to the five I feel Austen's original deserves, but I did enjoy it and I'll certainly give the next Austen Project books a go.