Monday, July 29, 2013

Twenty books made better when read together

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Lauren Passell tagged 20 peanut butter & jelly reads (books made better when read together), including:
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, and Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys

You’ve probably read Jane Eyre, the famous coming-of-age story featuring one of the strongest female characters in literature—and the infamous woman in the attic, Bertha Mason, who has been interpreted as representing everything from the confining nature of Victorian marriage, to the British Empire’s exploitation of its colonial subjects, to Jane herself. Wide Sargasso Sea, written as a prequel to Brontë’s tale, imagines the story from Bertha’s point of view.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Wide Sargasso Sea is among Siân Phillips's six favorite books, Richard Gwyn's top ten books in which things end badly, and Elise Valmorbida's top ten books on the migrant experience.

Jane Eyre also made Rebecca Jane Stokes's list of the ten hottest men in required reading, Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books list, Kathryn Harrison's list of six favorite books with parentless protagonists, Megan Abbott's top ten list of novels of teenage friendship, a list of Bettany Hughes's six best books, the Guardian's top 10 lists of "outsider books" and "romantic fiction;" it appears on Lorraine Kelly's six best books list, Esther Freud's top ten list of love stories, and Jessica Duchen's top ten list of literary Gypsies, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best governesses in literature, ten of the best men dressed as women, ten of the best weddings in literature, ten of the best locked rooms in literature, ten of the best pianos in literature, ten of the best breakfasts in literature, ten of the best smokes in fiction, and ten of the best cases of blindness in literature. It is one of Kate Kellaway's ten best love stories in fiction.

The Page 99 Test: Jane Eyre.

--Marshal Zeringue