It is a truth universally acknowledged...

Long before I had read Pride & Prejudice (P&P), I had heard of the opening line.(which I'm including below, along with the subsequent line):

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man  in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little know the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Before I begin with my thoughts on the first few chapters, I'd like a quick side rant: I found a version of P&P today that was created by a certain publisher that didn't include these lines. Now whether this book was created for training purposes, for demo testing or what, I still find it ludicrous that those two lines were omitted. This find reinforces my belief that the company doesn't value the sanctity of classic literature, but that's a long tirade that I'm not going to get into. I just had to point it out because having just started reading P&P, those are the most crucial lines I've encountered in the book.

As I've considered for a few days now how I'd like to do this, it dawned on me how much I miss college. In fact, I really do miss writing papers. (Yes, I know this makes me a nerd; and yes, I realize that I did hate writing papers in college). For those of you that know me, this past year I "helped" a "friend" write all of his essays for his intensive writing literature class. I honestly loved it. Getting back into that critical thinking mentality really kindled a fire for my intellectual mind, but unfortunately due to other events shortly thereafter, that fire was reduced to smoldering embers.

More to the point, was that I could go about it in a number of ways: Detailed plot analysis of a section, Character Analysis, Motif Analysis, Chapter-by-Chapter analysis (the options really do go on and on). And to be honest, now that I've written several paragraphs on this blog before even starting to talk about the book, I'm concerned that brevity isn't a strength of mine. As such, I think I'm going to take one more day, and read one more chapter before beginning to write about the book. I'm going to make a few drafts of possible outline  schemas I could use, possibly develop some criteria for evaluation, and maybe even do a few mockup (I told you, I can be a real nerd). Although, and hopefully this is not the case, I will find myself here at this time tomorrow with none of those academic-esque preparations completed, but at least that post will be starting fresh, and just about the book.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them
~ David Hume