Bookish TV programmes

CNN features the new episodes of The Great American Read, the first of which was broadcast last night. We are reminded of the accompanying posters.

Emily Brontë's classic novel "Wuthering Heights" is one of the 15 books to be given the travel ad treatment, with a rather haunting design in keeping with the theme of the doomed love story.
The "gorgeous" Wuthering Heights is described as having "convenient access" to Thrushcross Grange, another grand home that features in the novel. (Tamara Hardingham-Gill)

USA Today interviews host Meredith Vieira and finalist James Patterson about the coming episodes.

Question: How is the voting going? Meredith Vieira: We’ve had more than 2 million people voting for their favorite book, so it’s been a great summer of reading. You can only vote once a day, but you can vote every day. (Voting ends Oct. 18.) The list is so great, it’s across the board. It’s not just the classics you’d expect, like “Jane Eyre” – this guy is on it, I have to say (jokingly gestures toward Patterson) – so it really covers a lot of territory. (Jocelyn McClurg)

Another bookish TV series is making a comeback. As Art Daily reports, Treasures of the British Library has returned to Sky Arts:

Treasures of the British Library will take viewers on an absorbing, surprising and often poignant journey through history. From a handwritten Beethoven violin concerto score and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre manuscript, to the seminal 1978 Rock against Racism poster and audio recordings of George Harrison, this series will once again remind the viewer of the important role the British Library plays in preserving our collective heritage to provide inspiration for future generations, as seen through the eyes of a group of celebrated cultural figures. The series features moments such as Andrew Scott reading from the first quarto of Hamlet, following his renowned turn as the Prince of Denmark on the stage last year, and violinist Nicola Benedetti playing from a handwritten score of Beethoven’s violin concerto.

The New York Times Magazine has a piece of Cary Fukunaga and mentions his take on Jane Eyre.

His adaptation of “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel, starred Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender as a particularly smoldering Rochester. It is both exceptionally haunting and powerfully romantic — a horror story and a love story — and it required an entirely distinct directorial approach. “At first,” he recalls, “I was like: What do I do with the camera? It just sits there? But I really wanted to do a study on composition and restraint. Especially in my generation and younger, there’s this impulse to cut, to move and do things all the time, and I was trying to figure out how to do as little as possible.”
Fitting the entirety of “Jane Eyre” into a two-hour movie sometimes felt to Fukunaga like “a real sacrifice — the ability to explore characters for many hours was a sort of itching desire at that point.” (Willa Paskin)

Coincidentally, QCityMetro recommends a trip to the British Library, although the article is slightly misleading when it comes to Brontë items there.

Tomes of religious works, the Magna Carta, a folio of Shakespeare plays, sketches from Leonardo Da Vinci’s works, and notebooks from the Brontë sisters will fascinate you with their tiny, precise handwriting. Beatles fans — even those who aren’t — will get a kick out of seeing John Lennon’s son’s first birthday card — Lennon wrote the lyrics for a Hard Days Night on the back. (Mordecia D. Strickland)

20 Minutos (Spain) tells about a recent talk by Spanish writers Espido Freire and Fernando Marías on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

En opinión de Freire, Mary Shelley fue capaz de encontrar un "hueco absolutamente único con una voz definida", aunque ha hecho hincapié en las "complicaciones" que tuvo para publicar, como también lo tuvieron, ha añadido, otras escritoras contemporáneas como Jane Austen o las hermanas Brontë. En este sentido, tanto Freire como Marías han recordado que Shelley, Austen y las hermanas Brontë tuvieron que publicar sus libros con pseudónimos masculinos o esconder que los habían escrito ellas. (Translation)

Alison Ver Halen posts about Villette. The Brontë Brussels Calendar: July 1842 is up on the Brussels Brontë Blog.