Literary comfort food

According to National Review Online,

Many colleges want their students to have read a book before they start their first semester. Not just any book, but one carefully selected by a committee to represent the college’s ideals and aspirations. Translation: No Impact Man in, classics out. [...]
Colleges exclude the classics for three reasons. First, they say older books are irrelevant. Colleges fail to see how old-fashioned notions about marriage (e.g., Anna Karenina), class warfare (A Tale of Two Cities), personal morality (Jane Eyre), or slavery (Huckleberry Finn) have anything to do with the world today. They are more interested in the topics du jour — some of which right now are immigration, racism, global warming, the elusiveness of the American Dream, LGBT life, genocide in Africa, “food justice,” and the war in Iraq. (Ashley Thorne)

Fortunately, this columnist from Pocono Record knows better:

I came to Jane Austen relatively late in life. I was approaching 30 and had so far avoided “Pride and Prejudice,” having assumed it was a snobby kind of book, full of antiquated manners and concerns. An English friend assured me I was finally old enough to appreciate Jane — and lucky that no high school English teacher had ruined her for me.
I devoured “P&P” and haven’t stopped since. I usually reread one of the six extant Jane Austen novels every year (this year, it was “Persuasion”). They are literary comfort food for me — reliable cultural companions. I also enjoy Dickens, the Brontës, E.M. Forster and Trollope. Even the American novelists I like — Henry James, Edith Wharton — are English in their sensibilities. (Jacqueline Damian)

The Mail & Guardian (South Africa) has an article on the song Larney, Jou Poes! by Dookoom and Isaac Mutant,

And then there is Mutant [...]
He is the olive-skinned gypsy of DH Lawrence stories and the Dark Prince of Emily Brontë novels – the extreme version of Heathcliff – the mulatto slave who scowls in the shadows, scheming of ways to take the daughter of the landowner. He is the scary man, the bogeyman, the dirty lover in the darkest fantasies of the pious Victorian woman’s seething repressed libido – wanting, wanting, wanting. (Gillian Schutte)

Daily Sabah on 100 years of Turkish cinema:

A new documentary by Turkish director Cem Kaya, entitled "Remake Remix Rip-Off" (Motör), debuted on August 13 at the Locarno Film Festival. It squeezes in seven years of research on Yesilcam cinema, into a full feature that includes many of the aforementioned films as well as a five-minute montage of all of the Turkish film scenes that have been ripped off by Wuthering Heights. Catch this unique insight into the Turkish film industry at the 20th Festival on Wheels (Gezici Film Festival), which kicks off on November 28 in Ankara and runs until Dec.4, then heads to Eskisehir from Dec. 3-7 and closes in Sinop on Dec. 5-8. (Leyla Yvonne Ergil)

Feed Your Head interviews writer Anita Grace Howard, who picks Charlotte Brontë as one of her imaginary dinner guests. Mon Univers Lunatique writes in French about Jane Eyre 2011. Sololibri (Italy) features The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.