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Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Wednesday, January 22, 2014 9:34 am by Cristina in , , ,    1 comment
The New York Daily News' Page Views has 'A brief guide to faking your way through literary classics when you haven't actually read them'. Here's how you fake having read Wuthering Heights:
1. “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë
The gist: Miserable people make each other miserable while brooding in the moors. (Moors as in the land. Not as in “Othello.”)
The real summary for your non-reading pleasure: Healthcliff and Catherine grow up together, fall in love, but can’t be together because of Reasons, so they spend the rest of their natural lives mentally torturing each other and everyone around them. Obviously this does not end with death. The cycle of miserable people making each other miserable continues down the line to future generations. (Lauren C. Sarner)
Six well-known people write briefly about love in The Wall Street Journal. Here's Elaine Stritch's idea of romantic love:
I definitely think of myself as a romantic—without a doubt in the world. I can't believe how romantic I am. It's terrifying! When I saw Gone with the Wind, I didn't get out of bed for two days. And Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights? That's my idea of romance.
On a similar note, BooksBlog (Italy) recommends several books for Valentine's Day:
Da molti considerato un capolavoro, “Jane Eyre”, romanzo autobiografico di Charlotte Bronte, è una storia d’amore che va oltre ogni convenzione dell’epoca e fornisce un assaggio alle prime lotte di emancipazione femminile. Restando in famiglia, tra i grandi classici rientra anche “Cime tempestose”, della sorella Emily. (Angela Iannone) (Translation)
Still in Italy, a columnist from La Reppublica recalls how her grandmother sparked her love for reading by giving her, among others, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Judy (of Richard and Judy fame) is interviewed by Ahlan! (UAE).
What's your fave book? Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I re-read it evey year. (Sarah Swain)
The London Evening Standard reviews Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Last Word which may or may not be a fictionalised biography of writer VS Naipaul.
Mamoon’s shocking rudeness about other writers and inferior people sounds exactly like Naipaul too. “With his sarcasm, superiority, scrupulosity and argumentative persistence, Mamoon had made hard men, and, in particular — his forte — numerous good-hearted, well-read women weep”, we learn. “He didn’t want to be deprived of the jouissance of racism just because he had brown skin and had suffered it himself” — and his assessments of other writers are “more like road rage than literary criticism”. Just so.
The only woman writer Mamoon likes is the Caribbean-born Jean Rhys, about whom Naipaul wrote an admiring essay — “She’s the only female writer in English you’d want to sleep with. Otherwise it’s just Brontës. Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch! Can you imagine cunnilingus with any of them?” (David Sexton)
Picture source
The Journal reviews The Craven Heifer hotel at Addingham in West Yorkshire. It seems like one of the rooms is dedicated to Heathcliff:
It has always been difficult for me to settle on a main course when dining out, especially when faced with a menu as tempting as the one at the Craven Heifer in Addingham (and you wouldn't believe how difficult it was finding a Wuthering Heights quote to spoil).
A Brontë quote seemed fitting, though, with The Craven Heifer residing in the birthplace of Yorkshire's most famous literary family, and having one of the seven bedrooms dedicated to Heathcliff from Emily Brontë's classic novel. (John Lowdon)
The Misfortune of Knowing discusses whether Heathcliff is a man or a devil. Places of Fancy tries to locate Thornfield Hall. ITV3 announces the airing tonight of Jane Eyre 1997.

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