Classics are cool

The Arizona Republic confirms what we already knew without Oprah telling us:

Even Oprah's reading list now includes the classics. She has put her golden O stamp on Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and a box set of William Faulkner novels. That has helped bring them to the attention of young readers, said Peoria Unified District's Rosa McCollum, 39, an English teacher and assistant principal. "Oprah has made the classics cool again," she said.

In our humble opinion classics were always cool in the first place. To show this, you just have to browse through our archives and see the amount of people in love with the Brontës and the many forms of art they have inspired. Here's one more example:

[In Writing Life,] Jane Urquhart, for example, best known for her novels, offers a pair of poems about the creative demons that haunted those novelist sisters of the 19th century, Charlotte and Emily Bronte.

If you remember, we presented the collective book Writing Life some time ago.

Otherwise, why would publishing houses use Jane Eyre as a means of selling a book? And they tend to do that even when the connection is quite tenuous, as you well know! People just have to read the classics to see many of them are as gripping - and much better - than most books in the best-seller lists today. It's only that the word "classic" seems to scare many people away for unknown reasons.

And finally, here's wishing Andrea Galer the very best tonight at the Emmy's!

Outstanding Costumes For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special
Bleak House (Masterpiece Theatre) • Episode 1 • PBS • A BBC WGBH-Boston Co-production in association with Deep Indigo
Andrea Galer, Costume Designer
Charlotte Morris, Assistant Costume Designer

She already won a BAFTA TV Award for Best Costume Design earlier this year. BrontëBlog would like to wish her all the luck. Hopefully a year from now we will be able to report a new nomination and many awards for her work in Jane Eyre 2006.

Categories: Books