This is a rhetorical question but...

Have you ever read a plot summary better designed to induce projectile vomiting and the vague but persistent desire to set your eyes on fire than that of The Jane Austen Book Club? This nauseatingly smear of chick lit has apparently attached itself to a still-extremely-popular-and-considered-literary author in the desperate hope of gaining some kind of cache in the process, unaware that all it’s doing is throwing up the blinding differences between something that is funny, clever and holds up years and years later and something that looks and reads like the plug of hair that accumulates weekly in my shower. And will be considered about as significant in five years time.

The most recent in a series of frustratingly regular Borders email alerts I unwittingly signed up for describes it thusly:

“Six people - five women and a man - meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable - under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love...”

Dear. God. I’d rather paper cut myself to death with my copy of P&P.