What will be your icebreaker?

The Desert Sun talks about the Oscar-nominated costume designs exhibited at the FIDM in Los Angeles:

“Never ever ever take your history from the movies,” [Kevin] Jones [(curator)] said. “Especially your fashion history. There's rarely a time when they get it right.”
For example, Jones offered “Jane Eyre” as an example of a movie that accurately portrays the clothing of its setting, the 1840s. Costume designer Michael O'Connor, known for his extensive research, learned the lining, the buttons and the stitching that would have been used at that time. He even used an antique bonnet in one of the looks.
But the book, Nick Verreos points out, is most likely set in the 1830s.
“The director and the costume designer, they didn't like the clothes of the 1830s and felt it wasn't so flattering,” said Verreos, a FIDM spokesman. “They said, ‘Let's do it taking place in the 1840s.'”  (Sonya English)

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reviews Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy:

Is it time for us to move away from Jane Austen and start rewriting Charlotte Brontë? If so, Margot Livesey has put her hat in the ring. "The Flight of Gemma Hardy" is not subtle about its provenance. Livesey prefaces her book with a "Dear Reader" letter that explains that her novel plays off "Jane Eyre" and Livesey's childhood.
She lets us know she is "writing back to Charlotte Brontë, recasting Jane's journey to fit my own courageous heroine and the possibilities of her time and place. And, like Brontë, I am, of course, stealing from my own life." (...)
But the oddest parallel Livesey constructs is her re-creation of rural Scotland in the 1960s as disturbingly similar to Brontë's England. Characters do a lot of walking from place to place, have governesses teach their children at home, and eke out meager livings delivering the mail or working as household managers. There is no popular culture, no television, no sex and only the barest trace of globalism. Occasionally someone drives a car or a woman wears pants, and you remember this novel takes place in the 20th century. Mostly, though, it seems to wander through ahistorical moors. (Anne Trubek)

In the same newspaper we found this curious initiative at the James J. Hill Library, Minneapolis:

"Literary Speed Dating" -- where you discuss literature (or, probably, whatever you want) with prospective dates in two-minute conversations -- costs $10 and runs from 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday. Register online here: www.startribune.com/a1029.
What will be your icebreaker? "Wuthering Heights"? The love poems of Rod McKuen? "Romeo and Juliet"? Choose wisely! Your future could be at stake.

The Canberra Times has an article about a tiresome question - what is and what is not chick-lit:

Part of the problem is that no one can agree on a definition of chick lit. Bridget Jones's Diary is generally cited as an early example, but Allison Pearson hit the roof when her novel about a working mother, I Don't Know How She Does It, was assigned to the genre. The book's key ingredient – a sassy but klutzy female protagonist, embroiled in comical misadventures – could arguably be found in Jane Eyre, leaving any definition so elastic as to verge on meaningless. (Decca Aitkenhead)

The Independent (Ireland) has something to say about the status quo of chick-lit:

Does the arrival of men writing under the guise of female pseudonyms mean we've finally come full circle?
Or is this some sort of inverse sexism at play, the opposite of what poor Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell had to do to be taken seriously before they had earned enough respect to emerge into the light as Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, a way for men to appeal to eager hordes of female readers and sell some books?

The Dominion Post (New Zealand) interviews Mojo Mathers, MP:

The best movie I have seen recently was Jane Eyre.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that The Descendants won the USC Libraries Scripter Award (where Moira Buffini was nominated for Jane Eyre 2011); Broadway World announces that today, February 19, is the last performance of the Legacy Theatre production of the revised version of the Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre musical in Atlanta; Online College Courses doesn't think that neither Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre (and many others) should deserve the status of classics; K.Sankar & Kiluvankadu posts some pictures of a Tamil (!) translation of Wuthering Heights; x-forgive-me-again-x (in French) posts about a novel by each Brontë sister; Cooking Movies (in Italian) compares Jane Eyre 2011 and Jane Eyre 1996; Cărţi dragi (in Romanian) posts about the Brontës.