SENSE & SENSIBILITY by Joanna Trollope and EMMA by Alexander McCall Smith

As long as Jane Austen fans don't take themselves too seriously, they may find themselves enjoying books in The Austen Project--rewrites and updates by best-selling novelists of all six Austen novels. So far three have been published:

Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope, British author of contemporary and historical fiction

Emma by Alexander McCall Smith, Scottish author of many series including The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency and 44 Scotland Street

Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid, Scottish author of 27 crime novels (so far)

Still in preparation is Pride & Prejudice by American novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, and still to be assigned are Mansfield Park and Persuasion.

I've read the first two.

I always enjoy Joanna Trollope's domestic adventures of mildly troubled middle-class English suburbanites, so I looked forward to her rewrite of Sense & Sensibility. So did the book group at my church. We were somewhat disappointed.

The assignment is admittedly difficult: how do you bring people living with 19th-century inheritance laws and outdated courtship practices into the 21st century? Trollope stayed close to Austen's story, updating it with automobiles and electronic devices, but her characters were still stuck with 19th-century ideas and behavior. No doubt she was doing as she was told, but if she had allowed herself to stray further from Austen, her book might have been less anachronistic and more believable. If you're not already a Trollope fan, don't start here.

McCall Smith, on the other hand, did not trouble himself about anachronism (or even chronology, as it happens: the age difference between Emma and Mr Knightley varies wildly from page to page). Facing the same problem that stymied Trollope--how to portray 19th-century dilemmas in 21st-century garb--he mostly just makes us laugh. Mr Woodhouse is a hilarious neurotic and food faddist. John Knightley is a smart-mouthed London photographer. Mrs Goddard ("Mrs God") bakes cakes with funny ingredients. Mr Elton marries an Edith Piaf impersonator (who can't pronounce "Piaf"). Frank Churchill pretends to be gay.

Jane Austen's story is very much present, and you'll enjoy this book more if you're familiar with it. But mostly this is a book for McCall Smith fans, of which I am one.

FUNERAL MUSIC by Morag Joss

Thanks to my friend Anne Buchanan, who recommended Morag Joss's Sara Selkirk mysteries.

Anne knows the kind of mysteries I like best. I'd rather the murder(s) happened offstage. I want the characters to be more than plot devices--I like to read about their friends and families, what annoys them at work, what brings them joy, what they like to eat. I love a writer who knows how to develop a sense of place. And it helps if the writer can make me laugh every now and then.

I was delighted with Funeral Music.

Sara Selkirk is a concert cellist of international renown who has been suffering from "musician's block" for a year or so. Originally from Scotland but now a resident of Bath, England, Sara has agreed to play a short concert at the Pump Room in order to raise funds for the Bath Festival. Not long afterward she discovers a corpse.

Fortunately she is well connected. One of her cello students is a police inspector. A friend is a colleague of the murder victim. Another friend takes her to an alternative healing fair, where she happens to observe the eventual murder victim talking with a large man who, it turns out, badly wants a job they both are applying for. This friend's landlady, as it turns out, is the large man's girlfriend (Bath's population is only about 80,000). And then there is Paul, who is good with women and knives; and James, who has a rotten alibi; and George, the prejudiced museum guard, and ...

The puzzle is fun, with several healthy red herrings. Even more fun are Joss's descriptions--short ones, like "his face had the faraway, otherworldly look of a defecating Labrador," and dazzling longer ones, like her evocation of Bach's Trio Sonata in C Major, which

splashed out and down in a shower of weightless drops into the open lap of the abbey nave.... Only Bach could do this, make you feel you had been only half alive until this moment, pull you into the dance, lift you and take you as high as the roof, right up to where you could drink from the music's spring and be filled with a few bubbles of his crazy joy.... It flowed on, the little sounds dancing out across the transept like drops of light, darting through the melodic web that the organist's feet and fingers were spinning to and fro on which to catch them. Sara had the sensation that she had unknowingly been suffering from some sort of deafness and that with this glorious noise she had suddenly woken up to find that her ears were working properly.

Joss spices up the story with a number of complicated relationships: Paul and Sue (or Olivia?), Andrew and Valerie (or Sara?), Derek and Cecily (or Pauline?), James and Tom (or Graham?). One of the funniest scenes I've ever read in a mystery is between  Derek and his wife, Pauline, after she has learned about Cecily--but you'll have to read the book if you want to know more.

Publishers Weekly gave Funeral Music a starred review and P.D. James gave it a laudatory blurb. I'd call it a clever combination of Peter Lovesey and Jane Austen. I can't imagine why the Wheaton Public Library doesn't have the Sara Selkirk mysteries on its shelves, but they got it for me quickly through interlibrary loan. Or you can get a used copy for less than $4 from Amazon.

A JANE AUSTEN EDUCATION by William Deresiewicz

I loved William Deresiewicz's op-ed piece "A Matter of Taste?", a look at how "foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture." If you didn't read it, now's a good time.

Be sure to read the author's bio at the end. If you're like me, the next thing you'll do is buy or borrow his 2011 book, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter.

The book is part memoir, part literary interpretation, part wisdom literature. The three parts aren't seamlessly integrated, and that bothered some reviewers. I enjoy all three genres and appreciated the author's - let's call him Bill - self-deprecating humor, so I wasn't bothered.

Here's the plot: Bill recounts how he moved from disdaining Jane Austen to adoring her and eventually writing his Ph.D. dissertation about her. In the process, he also moved from being a (self-described) dumb 26-year-old with daddy issues and a dismal romantic life, to being a grown-up guy with an apartment, a job, good friends, and a wife.

Jane Austen, it turns out, was his life coach.

If you already like Jane Austen, you'll probably enjoy Bill's ideas about the messages underlying her six novels.

If you read Jane Austen a long time ago - or just saw the movies and TV miniseries -  don't hesitate to pick up this book. Bill gives enough context that you'll know exactly what's going on.

If you don't like Jane Austen (but have to read her for class), or if you've never tried her at all, go ahead and see if Bill can get you interested. His book is at least as much about "the things that really matter" as about Jane.

Thanks to Bill, I'm now rereading - well, listening to an audiobook of - Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's hilarious send-up of gothic fiction. It's read by one of my favorite narrators, Wanda McCaddon, under the name of Nadia May (she is also widely known as Donada Peters).