I’m a fast reader and at the moment I’ve read everything available on the JA fanfiction market and I’m desperately hoping for new additions.

And now last week my wish once again became true and lsparsons posted her story “How to mend a broke heart” at AHA (Regency, Adult).

and the very best ist: It is a PIP!

Okay truth is, it is not the very best. The story itself is fabulous but I love the fact that it’s a PIP (Sittin’ and waitin‘)

Blurb: A family tragedy calls Elizabeth Bennet home after Darcy’s proposal at Hunsford but before Darcy can deliver his letter. It is not until three years later that they meet again and after Darcy has just announced his engagement to another woman.

Elizabeth has benefitted from Lady Webberley, a distant damily member and is now after her death Elizabeth stays with Lady Matlock due to the fact that the latter fulfills one of Lady Webberley last wishes (but that wasn’t the ony thing Lady Webberley did to help Elizabeth).

And the engagement was now just officially anounced but – as we all know/suspect – Darcy doesn’t love her and the first time he sees  Elizabeth again, after three years he just can’t take his eyes off her. Everyone noticethat there was something between them… but I think no one has realized what it was (Alas! I hope Lady Matlock did, I would love to read her being the matchmaker).

Also there is the hint of a secret that surrounds Elizabeth (IMO, and after discussion with Angelika we both agree upon that) and I’m really, really curious.

And as I told Angelika today: I’m dying to read what will happen next!

This has nothing to do with fanfiction, but I really couldn’t resist when I found this list at Ariane’s LJ (GREAT resource for screencaps!). She says BBC reported that most people have only read 6 of these books. I think I’m above average, alone all Tolkien and Jane Austenbooks make up six books

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

There are a few I’d like to read (Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, Vanity Fair, The Remains of the Day, Sherlock Holmes…) and maybe I should some of those I’ve started and not finished again, because maybe I was too young when I started them (God, now I sound very old *g*), but we’ll see, the pile of yet unread books is growing steadily

And feel free to do this for yourself!

Theoretically I do not have the time to read or write fanfictions at the moment.

I have finished one paper for university yesterday (Ancient history) and have still two more papers to go (Medieval history and English didactics).

But nonetheless I read (and write – but me and my muse, that’s entirely another story and Angelika knows very well that my muse and I are constantly at war).

The last 2 days I reread The life and opinions of Gilroy Hurst, Gentleman one of the funniest P&P Fanfictions I have read so far (probably the funniest).

Blurb: Gilroy Hurst is not the lazy, uninterested drunkard he seems to be. Actually he pays a lot of attention to the people around him. Just they do not notice. As he, his wife, the Bingleys and Mr Darcy are at Netherfield, their life will change…

Gilroy Hurst @ DWG; Regency, E

Gilroy Hurst is the hero of this wonderful ff and Esther describes P&P from his POV. It is so hilarious! Sometimes I laugh so hard, that I’m almost crying. Even now after having read this Fanfiction 5 times (or so).

Gilroy is not the fat, boring, always slightly tipsy man as in the book (but he pretends to be). In truth he is a little bit like Mr. Bennet, with a dry wit a very sarcastic comments.

The whole story starts shortly before the Meryton Assembly and the whole storyline is changed because after watching Darcy and listening to him (and the others) at the assembly Gilroy pulls the strings and interferes a little bit into everyone’s life. He witnesses Bingley falling in love with Jane Bennet, discovers that Mr Darcy is in love too but that his loved one doesn’t seem to like him very much and has to fight of some people from the past.

One of the most hilarious OCs of this ff is called Colonel Foxtrot.

He was a German fellow from Bavaria, the land of Catholics and chocolate.

I am from Bavaria and *g* I know that a lot of Catholics live in the south but chocolate? Seriously? That’s Switzerland, folks.

All in all, an excellent Fanfiction, wonderfully written, with love to the detail and a lot of good characters.

If you haven’t read it so far, than go on! It is worth it!

I was about to complain how much I miss booknut’s stories now that “Fate & Consequences” is finished, especially on Wednesdays after I return home from my math lecture, when yesterday there was a very pleasant surprise! After finishing Fate & Consuquences (review hopefully comming soon but with my exams approaching fastly I cannot promise anything) booknut had actually announced that there would be a sequel to F&C and Chance Encounters (CE – and there is also a review still pending), albeit yesterday she surprised us with her first modern story, a cute little tale with six chapters altogether.

In her new story, called “Perfect Fit” and available (as far as I know) only at AHA (Adult rating btw) Darcy and Lizzy meet at a wedding (Darcy’s cousin Anne is marrying) by accident (so to speak) and there is immediate chemistry between them. Although their first meeting – well, bumping into each other describes it better, I guess – ruins her shoes, Manolo Blahnik shoes nonetheless!, the two hit it off with each other immediately. In the first chapter it was mostly talking, both of them very shy and Darcy was adament to replace her broken shoes (some kind of Cinderella moment IMO *sigh* – you totally had me with that one, booknut!) and meeting at Darcy’s hotel room. There was a kiss – very chaste, Darcy asked *sighs again* – but I guess that there is more to come in the following six chapters.

So, I’m very curious how this will develop and as a final conclusion: It doesn’t matter if booknut writes modern or regency stories – I’ll love them anyway.

VickyV posted her – correct me if I’m wrong – first story on Monday and I have to admit, I’m completely hooked! Great beginning and I’m definately looking forward to reading more from her in the future! But back to her first story, which is called “The last man” and posted at AHA.

What if Darcy hadn’t walked off and left Elizabeth alone after his first failed proposal? What if he came back to explain in person? Based off the proposal in the 2005 movie.

This beginning follows completely different end of the first proposal that is so emotionally charged that I almost could feel the sparks flying out of my computer. And then things progress very differently from the novel. I wish I could tell you more but it’s more a short story and only three chapters have been posted so far.

As I already said, I am completely hooked and an ardent follower of this story. Go ahead – read it!

(I know this is a very short post but I have spent my day writing about medical therapies so I’m not at my best at the moment)