just watched Pride and Prejudice... i love the film (Keira Knightly version) is the book hard going?

[juicychops]

im dying to read it when i get a chance and a break from my studying

Well this one does it for me. Had never heard of MM before and have never heard of him since but I really liked him as Darcy.

Absolutely read the book OP! It's not difficult to read at all.

We have both versions on DVD and dh and I have just finished watching the BBC version which I would highly recommend as well. It's much truer to the book and I prefer nearly all the characters in this version than the KK one. KK smirks and giggles a bit too much, Judi Dench a bit too aggressive and overall, I didn't think that 2 hours did the book justice. See what you think.

P&P is the most readable of JA's books, I think, and if you like it Emma and Northanger Abbey are also pretty good reads. Mansfield Park is very readable but suffers from a deliberately boring heroine although it has some very funny moments.

I love the Emma Thompson version of Sense and Sensibility, but find the book quite dry. While I've read Persuasion, I don't remember it very well, that was probably me rather than the book as I have a terribly bad memory and at one stage used to read everything very fast and not remember any of it very well.

It's a lovely book. The KK version of the film leaves out so much and the American ending is crap!

It's such a lovely book. Read it. I've just re-read it for the umpteenth time. It's my favourite novel. It could have been written yesterday. It remains current.

To the OP - P&P is wonderful and Jane Austen is one of the few 'classic' authors who you can still read anytime, anywhere. However, beware - if you become too fond of the books, you end up posting stuff like this:

Colin Firth as Mr Darcy does the bit where he's really unappealing extremely well, but not the rest of it. And I even fancy Colin Firth in other things (he was in an ancient J B Priestly miniseries when we were all 20 years younger and was fabbo).

The Jennifer Ehle/CF version already looks extremely old and dated. Odd. The KK version is just too quick - P&P doesn't work as a single film IMO, and it's pretty annoying with so little time to spend aeons looking at Lizzie Bennett staring soulfully into mirrors - of all the things Lizzie Bennett would do, this is NOT one of them. I will watch Donald Sutherland in anything and he was OK as Mr B but I would have liked him to dive into a pond

Can I just say that the most recent Andrew Davies Sense and Sensibility adaptation was historically awful. In what universe do you decide to cut Jane Austen to time by - erm - removing all the dialogue?