Texts from Jane Eyre

September 15, 2014
Humorist Ortberg offers a side-splitting take on famous literary characters from Gilgamesh to Hermione Granger by peeking into their imagined text messages, replete with emoticons, misspellings, and irregular punctuation. Some exchanges update well-known plot points—Goneril intercepts texts from Regan on Edmund’s phone and Gertrude offers to bring a tuna sandwich to Hamlet’s room. Others exaggerate character traits, like Scarlett O’Hara egging on Ashley to guess what corset she’s wearing, or Cathy and Heathcliff one-upping each other about the respective desperation of their love for each another. Ortberg keeps the joke fresh with jabs at various canonical authors, portraying Coleridge interrupted while composing Kubla Khan by “some asshole from Porlock” and Thoreau busily inviting friends and ordering supplies to his “self-sufficient” retreat to the woods. Ortberg gets the most mileage whenever she plays a quirky artist off a nonplussed straight man, whether it’s T.S. Eliot’s friend explaining “I can’t leave work to buy you a peach” or William Carlos Williams’s long-suffering wife reading his note that says, “i have eaten the little red wheelbarrow/ that was in the icebox.” Ortberg charmingly captures, in short, palatable bytes, what is most memorable about famous books and their indelible characters.

Starred review from November 1, 2014

This is the best kind of English-major humor. Ortberg, cocreator of the website The Toast, has a wicked sense of humor and an enviable grip on roughly the entire Western literary canon. The book consists of text conversations between notable fictional characters and authors, who are characters in their own right, such as Lord Byron, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson. It's loosely arranged by literary era. A final section includes more modern authors (Cormac McCarthy), works (Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca), and literary phenomena (the "American Girl" series, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter books, etc.). Conversations involving Great Expectations and Little Women are particularly entertaining. There's not a weak point in the book; it's terrific, snicker-inducing fun throughout. For the uninitiated, this title may serve as a gateway drug for The Toast. VERDICT Bibliophiles who enjoy their humor laced with snark will be thrilled to find this book, which is probably the only published work containing texts from Medea, Scarlett O'Hara, and Jessica Wakefield. [See Prepub Alert, 6/2/14.]--Audrey Snowden, Orrington P.L., ME

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