Texts from Jane Eyre
Ratings14
Average rating3.6
So funny! If the chatacters you know and love as well as the one you hate had a cell phone, this is what they would say. And we get to laugh.
The answer to the question nobody asked: What would some of the most famous literary figures (characters/writers) say if they texted their friends and family? Well, Mallory Ortberg asked it, I guess. Most of the answers she cooked up are worth reading – some will induce chuckles, maybe a guffaw, and many smiles.
The Jane Eyre conversations (as might be suggested from the title) are the best of the batch – although the Poe material is just as strong (Hamlet's close to that). The rest is a step or two back, in my estimation. Some of the rest of the material is pretty weak, but Ortberg makes the most of it. Typically, the reader's appreciation of these text messages will line up with their familiarity with the source material.
Still, no collection is going to be free from bad apples, and The Hunger Games' conversations aren't just weak, they're disappointing. I don't see how Ortberg could've missed so completely. But that's just 2 pages out of 200, that's more than a pretty decent percentage.
A nice break from heavier reading, I recommend taking these a few pages at a time – not the whole book in a sitting or two (although it'd be easy to knock out that way). Try for too many at once, and they lose their punch. Some funny stuff for book nerds here.
If anything it only serves to remind me how much of the classics I've yet to read. And while I can delight in those that I have, feeling smug in my recognition of phrases from J. Alfred Prufrock (the yellow smoke!) and my beloved Jane Eyre - I'm left adrift with Dickens, Cormac McCarthy and Henry James. And yes, The Hunger Grains would be the perfect name for Peeta's bakery.
So while a lot of the time it feels like i'm laughing along just based on context cues (Marius just seems like he's the worst) I'm too often lost and feeling shame over my clearly squandered English degree which was supposed to prepare me for books like this! Point removed for making me face my own literary inadequacies - I should totally know what the hell Coleridge is going on about!