Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights V

"This is a great read when you're in high school and sufficiently wrapped up in melancholic, romanticized drama. It's a bit tedious and ridiculous as you get older"


"frankly, the moral of this story eluded me"


"I hated to be suffocated. WH smothered me. Power or not, did I need that kind of passion? Hells no. Some things are too bad of an influence."


"Possibly the most over-rated novel in the English language, Wuthering Heights would probably not irritate me quite so much if legions of misguided friends and fellow readers weren't forever trying to convince me of its brilliance."


"Bad English major that I am, I've managed to somehow never read the majority of the classics. And I harbor nearly no desire to do so.

The first time I picked up the book and started to read it, I knew I couldn't do it. So I put it back on the shelf to try again at another time. The next time I picked it up, it seemed doable."


"The story carries the reader along, but every character is laced with a dramatic flaw (and by dramatic, I mean, it isn't like a 'weak man' could just be weak to his wife; he's weak in the face of the universal will. A selfish person isn't just selfish about her daily amount of reading time, or whether her husband goes out whoring or not; she's selfish about every single thing that comes into contact with her)."

BOY, IF ONLY WUTHERING HEIGHTS WAS ABOUT A WOMAN WHO WAS REALLY SELFISH ABOUT HER READING TIME. SOUNDS FUCKING THRILLING


"While Wuthering Heights is a classic and while I do respect it a great deal I cannot get past the old English vernacular and the long drawn out descriptions the Bronte uses."


"If I was Linton I would've tossed Heathcliff over the cliffs..(little side joke)"


"At one point Lockwood narrating what Nelly is relating of what someone else (Catherine?) said, and Nelly's relating it in the first person, as though Catherine(?) herself is speaking. Then the text says, 'I interrupted....' Who's interrupting? Catherine? Nelly? Lockwood? It turns out it's Lockwood, but I felt that as a reader I shouldn't have to pay attention to that type of detail."


"I really don't like this story! It's boring because I can hardly understand the story as the version of the book that I read was an old version."


"Classic British literature appears to be characterized by a universal lack of an actual plot that it attempts to make up for with painfully excessive wordiness. Wuthering Heights is no exception.

Fortunately for me, I've grown accustomed to reading such novels, and was actually able to get through it..."


"Ugh! Emily (author), give us a bone. Take us on a journey. Tell us a story. This book was painful to read."


"I don't understand how this book is called a 'romance'."


"The author completely skims over the pregnancies of Catherine and Isabella."

I WAS ONLY IN IT FOR THE GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF DELICIOUS PREGNANCY


"I was quite board with it."


"For me, it's like looking at Picasso's Guernica. You're amazed at the creativity and genius of the artist, and appalled at subject matter -- appreciative of the artist's skill, but offended by the subject matter."


"This book takes a really long time to get into, and it isn't that good. Books like these make me wonder... If I discovered a long lost manuscript of Emily Bronte or some other author of 'classics', and I submitted it to a publishing company anonymously, I highly doubt that it would be published. The point is, Classics are not good books. Books are vehicles for ideas, and so a good book is a book that can effectively use language to express ideas and create beauty. Long-winded descriptions and two-dimensional characters do not express ideas well, and are more exhausting than beautiful. I can see the merit of studying classics because they part of the history of literature, but it bothers me when people say classics are good books. Because, when it comes down to it, books like Wuthering Heights are not in any way good."


"I read it on the train and, as we RAN SOMEONE OVER, I got eightish hours to read it."


"It is really hard to get through the book if you are at all sensitive to the real world and real people."


"Why did Cathy die in the middle of the book? And we had to wait till over TWENTY YEARS afterwards for the end? It makes no sense for a plot."


"I hated this book. HATED it. The only thing that stops me from giving it just one star instead of two is that the writer in me has to admit it was well written. So good for you, Emily Bronte! You can write a story! I still hated it."


"This is a seriously a weird book! Why was this such a 'classic' that all high school English classes (except mine, of course) had to read it? It's so bizarre!

Of course, all I could think of the whole time I was reading this was Friends Episode #106, where Phoebe and Rachel go to a night class discussing Wuthering Heights. It's pretty entertaining, even though I couldn't find online any copies of all the lines at the class.

Anyway, I got to be 41 years old without ever reading this, and decided it was time.

First, I find the device of Nelly Dean basically telling the entire story to an uninvolved party very odd. Was it really that hard for Emily to convey everything, without relaying the entire story from Miss Dean to Mr. Lockwood, about whom I cared nothing?"