Intimations of Austen Giveaway...and Query

I am expecting a shipment of review copies of Intimations of Austen ,
my collection of Austen-inspired short stories (aka What-Ifs), and I thought it might be fun to do a giveaway...or two.

This is especially designed for you Everything Austen challengettes who want a quick read and are getting a little bored (dare I say it) with P&P and want to venture into Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Somehow I never wrote a short story around S&S or Emma--in the case of the latter, it might be because Queen Emma always insists on having full-length novels rather than short stories if she is to serve as inspiration. DISCLAIMER: I don't mean to imply that P&P doesn't get its due in Intimations...four of the nine stories are P&P-inspired, but that's less than 50%, for crying out loud!

If you would like to be entered in a drawing for one of two copies that I will draw for on Sunday, September 13:
1) Leave me a comment on this posting for one entry
2) Become a follower for two entries
3) Tweet about this giveaway for three entries
***Be sure to provide me with your email address so that I can let you know if/when you've won.

And since you're here, tell me which of the BBC list you've read (I have a few polls going and will be adding a few more until all 100 books are covered), and browse around the site. I did lots of posting on Gaskell last year, am currently deep in Shakespeare territory, love to post on Austen, and so forth.

Now for the query part...Jezebel recently read my post on Two Guys Read Jane Austen and commented on the dearth of male readers of Austen. I responded that I don't think men read the works of female authors near as much as women read the works of male authors. Granted, there is a heck of a lot more out there written by men than women, as Anne Eliot so aptly pointed out. But even now, when there are loads of women authors, do men read women?

Is Austen really the most often read female author amongst men?

Two Guys Read Jane Austen - Yawn

I confess, I was really looking forward to reading about how Two Guys Read Jane Austen.

I had a nice long flight from Denver to Boston on Sunday, and settled back and read the whole thing cover to cover. I'm glad I'm done with it and can pass it on to someone else. I don't think I'll even bother to shelve it on my miscellaneous Austen shelf (I had been thinking between Fay Weldon's Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (Weldon, Fay) and Kate Fenton's Lions and Licorice,which I just found out is now called Vanity and Vexation: A Novel of Pride and Prejudice.

What didn't I like? Well, for starters reading Austen means reading the lot, not just Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. That's called starting to read Austen. There are only six novels, for goodness sake. I got the feel these two guys were so eager to rush to print (to take advantage, as they acknowledge, of the Austen goldrush) that they read two and decided to call it good enough. But, no Emma? No Persuasion? Not good enough.

And frankly, they could have dispensed with the college-prank stories, the rehab stories, the plugging-their-other-books stories, and the wife stories. Publishing their letters is a nice gimmick, but how many times do I need to read "Give my love to Miranda" to get the effect of the letters-between-friends bit? When I read a book about Austen, I want it to be about Austen. I found myself skimming the non-Austen stuff looking for more Austen stuff.

The one bright spot was when one of them--and I never really tried to keep straight which one was talking--gave a reasonably good explanation for why Austen chose Henry VIII as the play from which Henry Crawford read and that Lady Bertram labels Crawford as quite a good actor.

They're probably looking for speaking opportunities now that they're Austen "experts" and they're a novelty in that they are beer-drinking guys who like to talk Austen. If they come to my neck of the woods, I might give them another chance, but I thought the book a trifle dull.