Wuthering Heights (Penguin Classics)

Wow, what a classic indeed.
Things I wish I'd known before reading:
- this is not a romance, it's a damn tragedy
- the narrator is some random dude that has nothing to do with anything
- it frequently switches timeframes (sometimes without warning) and can turn from a retelling to a retelling of a retelling so that gets a bit confusing trying to parse out who's point of view you are supposedly hearing from
- heathcliff and Catherine's "love story" only accounts for about half of the book
- it's super depressing and you pretty much hate all the characters

Language was tough to follow. POV changed often and was hard to follow. Lengthy, but worth it.

This is my second time reading Wuthering Heights. The first was years ago, back in school, and even then I couldn't understand why so many people insisted on calling love a central theme in this book. Coming back to it now, I feel the same—only more strongly. For me, this novel is one of those rare works that feels almost prophetic, like it doesn't just belong to its own time but reaches forward to speak across centuries. It's brutal, unflinching, and unapologetic in the way it exposes the darkest edges of human behavior. Emily Brontë never lets you hide behind excuses for these characters—she drags the ugliness out into the open and forces you to sit with it. That makes it feel less like a romance and more like a cautionary tale, startlingly ahead of its time. The writing itself is staggering. I can feel the atmosphere pressing in from every direction—every sentence soaked in mood and tension, pulling me straight into the storm-wracked moors. The story unfolds with this relentless rhythm, and the dialogue slices through with a kind of genius-level intensity. Brontë creates a world where even silence feels heavy with consequence, and it's impossible not to absorb it. The characters are almost impossible to love—and I think that's the whole point. They're not meant to be admired. They exist to show what obsession, cruelty, unchecked desire, and patriarchal power do when left to rot. People often call this a dark romance or a story of destructive love, but I don't see love anywhere in these pages. At best, there are fleeting flashes of compassion—but they're always measured, always conditional, never enough to cost the giver anything. If you've ever truly known love, you know it doesn't live in this book. And that's what makes Wuthering Heights so unforgettable. It dismantles illusions. It shows, in the rawest way, that passion without compassion, desire without responsibility, isn't love at all—it's ruin. And maybe that's why the book endures: because it forces us to stare straight at the truths we'd rather blur, soften, or ignore.

Difficult but worth it

Harrowing