Texts From Jane Eyre

By -
Texts From Jane Eyre, by Mallory Ortberg

SO FUNNY.  There, that is my opinion of this collection of texts from famous literary characters.  Mallory Ortberg writes The Toast, which I don't exactly subscribe to because there's more profanity than I like, but which I have often enjoyed perusing because it's very funny, mostly about art history, or literature, or history in general. It makes me extra happy to find humor about classic literature.

I would love to quote half this book at you but it's not easy, because it's all little texts.  But here is one installment of Edgar Allan Poe.

hey
where are you?
hi
where are you?
you're like two hours late
it's almost midnight
I can't get out of the house right now
Is your car blocked?
do you need a ride?
no
it's like
there's this bird
there's a bird on your car?
no he's sitting on my statue
it's like
mm it just keeps looking at me
got those fiery bird eyes
you know?
what?
fired up eyebirds
you know
like how when a bird looks at you so much
that you can't leave the house
that's
no
that's never happened to me
well it's happening like crazy over here
so i have to keep looking at him
it might take a while
oh and plus i fell asleep reading
i was asleep for like an hour
i literally just woke up
and now i have this bird thing to deal with
so i don't think i'm going to make it tonight
sorry hun :)

They are nearly all hysterical.  Medea is really good, and William Blake is a hoot, and HAMLET, and there's The Yellow Wallpaper which is freaky.  Also Nancy Drew!

Everybody who likes books should read it.

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more