No time for jokeless literature
Feb. 7th, 2015 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI read two books this week and I’m reviewing them OUT OF ORDER because I DO WHAT I WANT and what I want right now is to tell you about Texts From Jane Eyre.
From Mallory Ortberg, the genius behind Two Monks Inventing Art and Women Doing Stuff in Western Art History, among other works of genius humanties-related humor over at The Toast, TFJE is exactly what you think it would be. If you are already familiar with The Toast and with Mallory’s sense of humor, all I really have to say is: It is just as good as you hoped it would be. Go read it.
If you are all like “But I don’t know what this Toast thing all the hip ladies on the Internet are on about is, who is Mallory Ortberg,” I am sad for you, for you are missing out. But anyway: TFJE is a collection of goofy, lovingly snarky imagined text conversations—complete with misspellings and smiley faces and expressionist punctuation—from and among characters and authors of various works of literature. Most of them are staples of the Western canon that you probably read a bunch of in school, but the last portion of the book features more pop-cultural works like The Babysitter’s Club and The Hunger Games. If you like Kate Beaton’s webcomic Hark! A Vagrant!, TFJE’s similarly well-educated but irreverent sense of humor will probably appeal to you—because let’s face it, people tend to either not bother with literature or history or, when they do, they are WAY too serious about it. Just because they’re important doesn’t mean we have to take them seriously all the damn time.
Also, apparently you can make margarine out of whale oil? I don’t know if that’s true or not but I’m super curious now.
Because this book is literally all text conversations, it is a really fast read even though it covers a lot of different works. This means that in addition to being a work of art on its own, it makes a particularly good palate cleanser if you have been reading something long and serious, or if you’re avoiding starting something long and serious but will feel bad if you avoid it too hard.
From Mallory Ortberg, the genius behind Two Monks Inventing Art and Women Doing Stuff in Western Art History, among other works of genius humanties-related humor over at The Toast, TFJE is exactly what you think it would be. If you are already familiar with The Toast and with Mallory’s sense of humor, all I really have to say is: It is just as good as you hoped it would be. Go read it.
If you are all like “But I don’t know what this Toast thing all the hip ladies on the Internet are on about is, who is Mallory Ortberg,” I am sad for you, for you are missing out. But anyway: TFJE is a collection of goofy, lovingly snarky imagined text conversations—complete with misspellings and smiley faces and expressionist punctuation—from and among characters and authors of various works of literature. Most of them are staples of the Western canon that you probably read a bunch of in school, but the last portion of the book features more pop-cultural works like The Babysitter’s Club and The Hunger Games. If you like Kate Beaton’s webcomic Hark! A Vagrant!, TFJE’s similarly well-educated but irreverent sense of humor will probably appeal to you—because let’s face it, people tend to either not bother with literature or history or, when they do, they are WAY too serious about it. Just because they’re important doesn’t mean we have to take them seriously all the damn time.
Also, apparently you can make margarine out of whale oil? I don’t know if that’s true or not but I’m super curious now.
Because this book is literally all text conversations, it is a really fast read even though it covers a lot of different works. This means that in addition to being a work of art on its own, it makes a particularly good palate cleanser if you have been reading something long and serious, or if you’re avoiding starting something long and serious but will feel bad if you avoid it too hard.