Friday laughs: Joey Comeau on literary posturing

It’s the first full-shift Friday in the Canadian publishing world after a summer of lovely half-days. In lieu of a Walrus-style dance break, Quillblog will now offer a brief dose of humour for the bookish who are less likely to let their back bone slide amongst their peers. Over on Open Book: Toronto, the current writer-in-residence, ECW author Joey Comeau, offers his take on five classic books he knows nothing about:

1. In Search of Lost Time – Proust.

This is a seven volume book about some guy waking up, and possibly going to get a newspaper and making breakfast. Also, there are lesbians in one of the books. Which seems like an okay reason to wake up.

…

5. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte.

I just think of the cover of the movie Gone with the Wind, which I don’t know anything about, either. There’s a man holding a woman tightly, like they’re going to have sex and then blow up the white house. Because they’re some kind of revolutionaries! Well, he is, and she loves him so much that she doesn’t care. Even bloody carnage is peace when she’s in his arms.

Click here for the full list.

Bookmarks: Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, the Brontë sisters, and more

A few bookish links from across the Web:

• To help you with the holiday shopping season, The Inkwell Bookstore Blog compiles a selection of gifts for the Jane Austenite on your list, including the Pride and Prejudice board game 
• Margaret Atwood picks the top ten gifts to give a budding novelist
• The New Yorker has compiled the top ten books of 1709. The most colourful title? Cotton Mather’s The Golden Curb for the Mouth, a sermon against swearing
•  The Brontë sisters get a little help from the Twilight phenomenon: The Guardian reports that new films of Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre are being cast with younger, hotter stars to appeal to Twihards 
• You’ve heard of the proposed Harry Potter theme park. How about a theme park dedicated to Gulliver’s Travels? 
• Bask in “the soft periwinkle glow of the Alaskan morning,” because the results of Slate‘s “Write like Sarah Palin” contest are in
• The blogosphere has been buzzing with the best books of the decade lately, so what about the decade’s worst books?