Texts from Jane Eyre

Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters by Mallory
Ortberg, 226 pages

Ever wonder what our favorite classic novels would be like if the characters had smart phones? No? Well, Mallory Ortberg, creator of the fabulously snarky The Toast website, did, and she presents some imagined text-message-based conversations here. While I particularly liked the multiple text conversations between Hamlet and his mother, and the Pride and Prejudice segment (man, that Mrs. Bennett is a piece of work!), I'll readily admit that a lot of these were lost on me, as I'm not particularly well-versed in ancient Greek tales.

Also, and this is as much a quibble with the title of the book as anything else, several of the conversations are between writers and unknown others, rather than characters written by the authors. This works rather well in the case of Edgar Allan Poe (who keeps texting someone to say that this annoying bird at his house is what's making him late for an unspecified engagement) and for John Keats (who goes on at length, and in all caps, about this awesome urn), but if you're not that familiar with the author's work, they aren't nearly as funny.

So basically, if you get the joke, it's hilarious. If you don't, it's a bit meh. Read only if you're a book nerd. Skim if you're not.

Texts from Jane Eyre

Texts from Jane Eyre: and Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters by Mallory Ortberg, 240 pages

What would it be like if texting was available to Hamlet, John Keats, or, obviously, Jane Eyre? It would very well be something like what Mallory Ortberg has written here. An example, with 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?

And so on. What makes so many of these great is that she manages to get a lot of the feeling of the original source material into these imagined text conversations (the one with John Keats going on about his urn is a personal favorite), even when she's not deliberately referencing a certain book or story. Some of the conversations went a bit over my head since I wasn't familiar with the story or characters, but if you were an English major or are a big fan of the classics, this will probably amuse you.