Black Friday ideas and other news

If you are in the US you might want to devote part of Black Friday to following the shopping recommendation from Newsday. If not, you might indulge in this kind of shopping spree all the same.

This season, Penguin Classics, the standard bearers for paperback reprints of the literary canon, has released a series of eight English masterworks - including novels by Austen, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Hardy and Wilde - in clothbound editions ($20 each) exquisitely fashioned by Coralie Bickford-Smith, a rising star of British design. Each volume's cover has a repeating pattern that cleverly refers to the work at hand: chandeliers (like the ones at Miss Havisham's) for "Great Expectations," thistles and thorns (the kind you might find on the moors) for "Wuthering Heights." (Peter Terzian)

Actually, we included these gorgeous Penguins in our Brontë Christmas gift selection last year, but this year they look great all the same.

Or if you're in the Haworth area (or in the UK, really) you might want to start planning all your visits and activities at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Culture 24 includes the press release on the outcome of the Brontëana surgery and next year's exhibition at the Parsonage. And The Telegraph and Argus has a reminder on an activity taking place next December 12th:

There's a Bronte mash-up in Haworth next month as famous characters escape from the novels.
Mr Lockwood's Confusing Christmas will see them let loose in the Bronte Parsonage Museum.
Mayhem is promised on December 12 with characters from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
Mr Rochester meets Cathy under the mistletoe while Jane finds Heathcliff in the graveyard with a shovel.
The event, which continues all day, is free on admission to the Haworth museum.
Details from 01535 640188 or jenna.holmes@bronte.org.uk. (David Knights)

If you are simply lost in the Twilight zone, here's today's selection:

From The Malay Mail:

The books were loosely based on literary classics.
Twilight on Pride and Prejudice, New Moon on Romeo and Juliet (couldn't you guess?) while Eclipse and Breaking Dawn on Wuthering Heights and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, respectively. (Amir Hafizi)

What that really means is that when Eclipse is released in cinemas we may expect about 100 times more references in the press than we are getting with the books, the first film or the just-released New Moon. Ah, nice.

Their Bad Mother - a Beliefnet blog - wants her children to learn about love from novels so taht they are ready afterwards for the real thing.

And I want to be able to trust that when she reads stories about love - whether those be from the Twilight series or the Sweet Valley High series or Shakespeare or Tolstoy or the Brontes - she'll be able to recognize that some depictions of love are more dramatic than others and that one can feel as deeply as Juliet without needing to fling oneself on a blade like Juliet. [...]
Because raising a feminist means raising a girl - or a boy, for that matter - to think for herself. And to feel for herself. And to decide for herself how she wants to love and be loved. And I trust that if I do that right, all the Juliets - or Emmas or Janes or Annas or Bellas - in the world won't lead her astray from her own, empowered heart.(Catherine Connors)

And RH Reality Check has A Feminist's Guide To Curing Yourself of Twilight-Mania. Step One:

-Talk to someone who thinks Edward Cullen is actually, non-problematically, an ideal man.
To achieve this goal, you likely just need to point at a random woman under the age of 40, but it may take a little searching. When you hear a real, live person say with wide eyes that she wishes her partner were more like Edward, you will begin to feel the Twilight ties loosen. Sure, you've enjoyed the "Romeo and Juliet/Heathcliff and Cathy go to high school" quality of the books. But you wouldn't actually want to date Romeo or Heathcliff. And you don't want to be in the same category with someone who genuinely wishes strange men snuck into her room and watched her sleep, sternly forbid her from doing things he didn't like, or caused you to ignore everyone else in your life.
If you know in your heart that Edward shouldn't be real, then meeting one of these super-fans is a great first step towards a cure. (Sarah Seltzer)

Two blogs for today in Portuguese: Messy Room posts about the Brontë sisters and Clube Feminino de Leitura about Wuthering Heights. Flickr user Hank Conner has uploaded an atmospheric photomontage entitled 'Waiting for Heathcliff'.

Categories: Books, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights