I think I'm handicapped by having read Jane Eyre first time as an adult, and everybody in it just made my teeth itch. Jane was a whiner, Rochester was a dolt, St. John was a self-important prig, all the women were ciphers, and the little girl was just an irritant. Maybe I'd have been able to spend an afternoon with the housekeeper. Maybe.

When I first read Jane Eyre, I was ten, and I *loved* it. I reread it as an older teen, and had the same reaction as your paragraph above -- I couldn't read the book fast enough to get away from these people.

I don't remember how old I was when I read Wuthering Heights, but I remember loving it at the time. More for the atmosphere and the DRAMA than for the characters.

I read both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when I was 14 or 15. And then I reread both of them when I was in my 30s. Jane Eyre held up better, for me.

I read Jane Eyre for the first time about six years ago and I adore it.

P-C, if you read Middlemarch make sure you get a copy with footnotes, I believe mine is a Penguin edition. Eliot references lots of events and situations that were current to the times but you probably wouldn't know about.

I'd recommend that for a lot of Victorian novelists. A lot of them (Trollope also comes to mind) were very much of their time. Which grounds their work in a reality but also means they make a lot of dated references.

Had to share this. I was in a bookstore yesterday and overheard this conversation:

Customer: "Do you have the new James Bond book?"
Clerk: o_O ?
Customer: "You know, Casino Royale?"
Clerk: Welllll, if you go to the fiction section under F, as in Flemming, Ian Flemming, we might have a copy. If you don't find it let me know.

(pause)

Customer: "It doesn't have a movie cover so I'll wait. Thanks".

Wasn't Casino Royale the first James Bond book?

Yes, Megan. Came out around 1953 or so. (Yes, I have all the Bonds written by Fleming. I would say "novels," except For Your Eyes Only is a collection of shorter stories, two of which were combined for the movie. And I remain of the opinion that The Spy Who Loved Me could have made a great movie.)

It doesn't have a movie cover so I'll wait.

t cries

It's people like this who are the reason it took me weeks to find a non-movie cover version of LotR to replace my water-damaged set after they were destroyed in a terrible humidifier incident.

The stupid burns. I should be happy that people at least are in a bookstore, but when I worked at Barnes & Noble, people used to come up to me and ask for the blue book.

They never meant the Kelley Blue Book. It was always that one book with the blue cover, no author, title, or genre to be found in their pointy heads.

Of course, this customer would get Casino Royale home and be like, WTF is all this World War II crap doing in here!

Cause, as faithful as the movie might be (and I'm pretty sure it's not), it sure doesn't look period. The description of the villain, on like page 3, depends strongly on a WWII context. Which I thought was really cool -- it's hard to come up with a scenario where a guy could have no name and no nationality. WWII displaced persons camps are about the only scenario I can think of in the modern era.

The stupid burns. I should be happy that people at least are in a bookstore, but when I worked at Barnes & Noble, people used to come up to me and ask for the blue book.

The same thing used to happen at Border5s. All.the.time. "It was blue, and it was on your front table a month ago. How could you not know what book I'm talking about?...No, I don't know the title or the author."