I bought this book a few weeks ago and things have been so crazy that I haven't started it yet. My intention was to read it before the movie comes out in late September/early October. We will have to see if that actually happens!

Has anyone read the book or heard anything about the movie?

I loved that you posted the trailer and materials here.
I read the book a long time ago. Hardly remember it at all, though I suspect that means I'll need to reread.

dmr

This is The Guardian UK's review of the movie The Jane Austen Book Club. You know it's bad news when it starts with 1 star. The link is:
arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2211634,00.html
What do you think? I still haven't seen the film.

dmrbooks


The Jane Austen Book Club


* (1 star)

Peter Bradshaw
Friday November 16, 2007
The Guardian

It is said that Kelvin MacKenzie, notorious editor of the Sun, once answered a phone call from a persistently complaining reader by yelling: "Right! That's it! Who's your newsagent? You're barred from reading the Sun!" I feel like phoning everyone involved with this icky, brain-dead, ya-ya-sisterhood sludge and demanding to know who their bookseller is so that they can be barred from reading Jane Austen. It's all about a desperately cloying and mutually supportive group of "women" - although their resemblance to real, carbon-based life-forms is tenuous - who form a Jane Austen book club and of course pedantically relate the novels to their own love-lives, in a way that's supposed to be vulnerable and gutsy and life-affirming. The sheer, willed infantilism of these people gigglingly finding individual Austen characters attractive or, alternatively, totally annoying, is like listening to fingernails scraping down the blackboard. Kathy Baker's smilingly wise older character Bernadette is the very worst; she responds to news of her fellow book-clubbers' emotional crises by saying things like: "It's a good thing we're reading Sense and Sensibility next" - remarks for which she should really be slapped round the face with a year-old halibut.

I read the book this summer. Obviously too early in the summer to recall much detail now. I may have to reread it before seeing the movie or maybe I will see the movie first and see if that stirs up any memories. That sounds bad, like the book did not have any impact on me especially since I enjoy all things Austin. Thanks for posting the review from The Guardian.

I think you should definitely read the book before you've seen the movie, or if you've already seen the movie, still read the book. Fowler's book offers a creative, postmodern perspective on Jane Austen. Perhaps I am biased because it is now one of my favourite books of all time.
As a result of this book I now want to reread Austen, not that I didn't originally, but this book will give a fresh perspective on her work. Sometimes book critics are not always right, and they expect something to be different because of the lens through which they perceive things. So give it a chance, and try to be aware of your own lens through which you perceive things. This can have a great impact on how you see the world, and especially everything that you read. I hope this helps.