Let's judge whan young women are reading

A columnist from The Telegraph wonders 'Why are young women so into fairy porn and sexy monsters? The answer can’t be good' (There are increasing numbers of young men absorbing all sorts of far-right messages, but by all means let's focus on judging what young women are reading for fun).

Maas and co are clearly wonderful, almost psychic conjurors and entertainers, but they are no Charlotte Brontë or Edith Wharton, authors who gripped and entranced me in my own turbulent, disillusioned and yes, "heteropessimist" early days.

Of course people should enjoy and consume romantasy if that's what fires them up. And no wonder that it does: the genre is, at heart, both crude and obvious, which chimes perfectly with the sensibilities of the social-media age. But I can't help but feel that its rise marks both the end of the heyday of English literature, and perhaps of maturity itself. (Zoe Strimpel)

We sort of went through this with Twilight back in the day, didn't we? Women are never reading what they are supposed to be reading for their own good. Even in the days of Charlotte Brontë, of course, women weren't supposed to be reading her books.

A contributor to Hindustan Times writes about 'Reading Nobel Winner Anne Carson in the Kullu Valley'.

Ten of us are on two long rectangular tables set side by side –a bookshop owner, a chef, a snowboarding instructor, a wildlife conservationist, a Wall Street banker turned photographer, a retired Indian Administrative Services officer, a therapist, two writers and a librarian. We are trying to understand this complicated poem, this pastiche of memoir, of descriptions of the landscape, of dreams and an obsession with Emily Brontë. [...]

Running through these landscapes of grief and loneliness, is our narrator’s obsession with Emily Brontë whose collected works she carries around with her. The fifth Brontë sibling, a motherless girl who wrote poetry and but one novel – Wuthering Heights, which was published when she was 29. A year later, she was dead.

“Emily Brontë was good at cursing”, our poem’s narrator tells us.

Elsewhere she puzzles “How did Emily come to lose faith in humans?”

What did Emily know of evil and heartbreak? How could she write poetry and a novel like Wuthering Heights, so full of savagery and passion? Our narrator wonders.

Sitting at the table, we are trying to make sense of these interwoven worlds as well.

“What do the ‘hanged puppies’ in the poem mean?” the snowboard instructor says.

“It’s a line from Wuthering Heights,” someone replies.

“But hanging puppies-why?” the chef says.

“Emily Brontë was an animal lover, maybe that’s her way of showing villainy and the wildness in human nature, to have characters like Hareton and Heathcliff hanging puppies,” I say. I have wondered about this myself earlier and, naturally, have already researched it online.

Someone orders a black bean burger, someone else an avocado sandwich. The food arrives, the bread is broken and passed around. The conversation flows on, drifting through Brontë’s dark moors, Carson’s dreams and her grief, and back into our own lives.

I look at my watch. Somehow, three hours have passed. (Sonya Dutta Choudhury)

Young Hollywood recommends '5 Classics To Read To Get In The Mood For The Colder Months' and one of them is

1 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Starting off strong with one of my all-time favorite books we have Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Filled with secrets and a moody, gothic atmosphere, the book follows Jane after she takes a job as a governess and falls deeply in love with her employer, the mysterious Mr. Rochester. Tormented by her past, her current situation, and the dark secrets coming to light in this haunting manor, Jane is forced to face her reality and learn how to grow, making this novel a classic coming-of-age story. Considered one of the first feminist novels (as I further argued on in my AP Lit exam), Jane Eyre is a book about discovery, both of the self as of what lies beneath of what’s in front of your eyes. Full of substance, beautiful language, and one of the greatest twists in literature, Jane Eyre is just one of those books that haunts you long after finishing it and can enhance the tone of these months to come. (Renee Caballero)

Discussing film adaptations of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, a contributor to Collider claims that

There is no guarantee that a great book will also become a great film, as it’s actually seldom that they are equivalent in quality. There has certainly been no shortage of amazing classics of literature, the likes of which everyone had to read in high school, that were absolutely ruined when they were adapted to the screen. This year’s Wuthering Heights is only the most recent example, as Emerald Fennell only adapted half of the novel and seemed to entirely miss the point of what Emily Brontë was trying to say. (Liam Gaughan)

AnneBrontë.org posts about 'Charlotte Brontë’s Ghost At Stonegappe'.