Books

You know, if they’d given me books like this to read in high school, I might have actually read them.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton–and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers–and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

Outstanding. I just hope that someone has bought the movie rights. Who do you think should play Elizabeth in the film version? Leave a comment and let me know. Thanks to Crooked Timber and The Little Professor, both of whom have their own suggestions for similar works, for the link.

You’ve probably already figured this out from the tone of the recent strips, but for the third and apparently last time, cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is preparing to quit the funny pages.

The 51-year-old cartoonist said he will pull the plug on his comic-strip career and “Opus” after Nov. 2.

In an e-mail to the Los Angeles Times, the 51-year-old Breathed wrote, “30 years of cartooning to end. I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans.”

[…]

Breathed, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Bloom County,” also writes screenplays, novels and children’s books. In a press release from the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates “Opus,” he said, “With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I’m suspending my comic strip to assist the nation. The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently and write funny stories for America’s kids. I call on John McCain to join me.”

Five years ago, when Breathed first spoke about resurrecting Opus, he said “It was painful to sit through the war without a public voice.” I guess he decided that the voice he had, doing children’s books and other stuff, will be sufficient for him going forward. I wish him well in those pursuits.

By the way, if you go to BerkeleyBreathed.com, you can guess what ulitmately happens to Opus. I think I’d feel a little too weird about that to participate. Better to imagine him as perpetually in the 1980s, pursuing dandelions, rock and roll, and Diane Sawyer.

You may recall the news from 2006 that President Bush read Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” while on vacation in Crawford, the announcement of which caused a few heads to explode. If you think you’ve sufficiently recovered from that, then you will be pleased to hear that The Catastrophic Theater will be presenting the regional premier of the play “The Strangerer”:

In hopes that the French philosopher might shed some light on the recent political clime – or vice versa – Mickle Maher’s new play The Strangerer collides several of Camus’ works with the first Bush/Kerry presidential debate in 2004. The formalities of the debate are overturned as Bush and Kerry struggle with the question not of if or why an innocent man should be killed (the man in question being moderator Jim Lehrer), but rather what is the proper manner in which to go about killing him. The Strangerer is part political satire, part classical drama, and part contemporary debate. A murder mystery with the murderers in plain view.

And who among us hasn’t wanted to murder a debate moderator this year? The show runs on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from October 16 to November 8 at DiverseWorks Artspace (1117 E. Freeway). Check it out.

It all started nearly five years ago, and now it has finally come to an end: Slacktivist has reached the end of the first “Left Behind” book. How do you wrap up something like this? Here’s a taste:

Left Behind, ultimately, is just nonsense. It makes up its own rules and then breaks them. And then it makes up more rules that require its other rules to be broken. Left Behind refutes itself.

The premise of the book is clear and clearly stated. The Rapture and all the other events foretold by premillennial dispensationalist “bible prophecy scholars” are all real and are all really going to happen. Soon. The book wants to show us the events of this cosmic drama acted out before our very eyes in a story that takes its plot from the authors’ End Times check list.

Yet the more we watch, the more we read, the less convinced we become that such a series of events could ever occur. Not because they’re too outlandish, but because they contradict and preclude one another. We cannot accept the authors’ assertion that A will be followed by B and then by C, because A renders B impossible and C could never take place in a world in which B had already happened.

This is the great and insurmountable failure of Left Behind. It set out to be a work of propaganda, a teaching tool meant to demonstrate — the authors would say to prove — that the events it describes could and indeed will really happen. Yet their attempt to present a narrative of such events instead demonstrates — I would say proves — that these events could not and indeed will not ever happen. It proves that the weird and contradictory events of their check list could never happen in a world anything like the world we live in, or in any other imaginable world. It proves that their supposed prophecies will never, and can never, be fulfilled.

Left Behind fails as a novel for many, many reasons, but all of its other faults — the odious lack of empathy it holds up as a moral example, its blasphemous celebration of self-centeredness masquerading as Christianity, its perverse misogyny, its plodding pace, its wooden dialogue, it fetishistic obsession with telephones, its nonexistent characterization, its use and misuse of cliches, its irrelevant tangents, deplorable politics, confused theology, unintentional hilarities, hideous sentences, contempt for craft, factual mistakes, continuity errors … its squandering of every interesting premise and its overwhelming, relentless and mind-numbing dullness — all of these seem to be failures of the sort that one might encounter in any other Very, Very Bad book hastily foisted off onto the public without a second glance.**

Any one of those faults, on its own, would have been enough to earn Left Behind a place on the Worst Books of 1995 list. The presence of all of those faults — in a single book and in such concentrated form — is more than enough to secure its place on a list of the Worst Books of All Time.

If you’ve not been reading this outstanding series, which I’ll say again is some of the best contemporary writing anywhere, all I can say is you’ve been missing out. Read The Visitation Preacher, with a box of Kleenex handy, for a singular example. You can plow through those archives, or you can hope someone takes up Chad‘s suggestion and gets the whole series published as a book, but either way, go read. And wait as I am with bated breath for the (hopefully less than five years length) series on the “Left Behind” movie, and the first of the book sequels.

So one of the things I did while on vacation last weekend was finish reading Gregory Maguire’s book Wicked, which I’d been meaning to do for awhile. It’s a very interesting book, if a tad bit slow at times, and the chapter about the inevitable confrontation between Elphaba and Dorothy is excellent. But man, is the book nothing, nothing in any way, shape, or form like the musical. I mean, sure, you expect differences, and a dense 400+ page book is surely going to need radical surgery to be transformed into something stage-worthy, but really, the two things almost can’t be compared. For one thing – I don’t want to give anything away here, so I’ll be brief – the musical takes place almost entirely during the college years of Elphaba and Galinda/Glinda; that same time period is maybe 25% of the book. Glinda hardly existed as a character after the Shiz years in the book, whereas she shares top billing in the musical. And though it hardly needs to be said, the endings are very different.

While there is of course nothing unusual about a stage/movie adaptation of a book taking a wide divergence from the source material, it’s usually the case that experiencing one form of the story will give you some idea of what to expect when you experience the other form. That just wasn’t the case here. Another example of this is the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which is completely different in just about every way than the book Who Censored Roger Rabbit?; whichever one you consume first, you will not be able to anticipate the action when you experience the other. What’s your favorite example of this?

One thing that reading “Wicked” makes me want to do is actually read the original source version of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, namely L. Frank Baum’s book. It was clear to me in reading that last chapter of “Wicked” that the movie version, from which I gathered almost all of my Oz-related knowledge, was not Maguire’s inspiration for those scenes. I did read one of Baum’s sequels, The Magic of Oz as a kid – I have no memory of how I came across it – but not the original. Time to fill that gap, I suppose.

One of the fine people I met at my precinct convention on March 4 was a woman named Cathy who served as the convention secretary. She sent me the following information about an upcoming appearance by Judy Norsigian that I said I’d pass along:

Saturday 4/12/08. 4pm Pregnancy & Birth: women’s problems & nurses problems in Houston.

Judy Norsigian, founding member & Exec. Director of Our Bodies OurSelves (OBOS), Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestros Vidas, Boston Women’s Health Book Collective representative, writer, and international women’s health advocate, hosted by National Nurses Organizing Committee-Metropolitan Houston Chapter (NNOCTexas):

Public invitation: Labor & Delivery nurses, Ob/Gyn nurses, midwives, childbirth activists, community women, women’s health advocates…

3:45pm Press conference; Dinner. NNOC Houston Office:1709 Rosewood near N. Main St. Houston

4pm Dialogue & Dinner

Contact Linda Morales [email protected]

Sunday, 4/13/08, 10:45am-noon, Houston Women’s Group, Politics of Pregnancy & Birthing in the USA: Sojourner Truth Room, 3rd floor of the
First Unitarian Universalist Church, 5200 Fannin, at Southmore.(elevator accessible).

For more information email Courtney [email protected]; website: http://www.houstonwomensgroup.com/

Judy Norsigian, Exec.Director, co-author, of” Our Bodies, Ourselves,” will lead discussion on the politics of women’s health movement, creating choices in pregnancy and birthing; book signing. Lunch afterwards.

Website: http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/publications/childbirth/default.asp

Tuesday 4/15 5:30-7pm Texas Medical Center Women’s Health Network, Women’s Health and Sexuality & Childbirth Controversies. Houston Academy of Medicine-TMC Library, 1133 John Freeman Blvd., Ground Level Conference Room (directions and parking information here.

The program is free and open to the public. Refreshments are served.
http://whn.library.tmc.edu/about.shtml
http://apps.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/local/texasgulfcoast/homepage.cfm?areaid=25

Judy Norsigian bio informtion here.

Any questions, let me know and I’ll pass them on.

Houston. It’s Worth It. is now in book form. Houstonist has a conversation with its authors, Randy Twaddle and Dave Thompson. There’s also info in there about a couple of “big blowout parties” related to the book, one of which is tonight. Check it out.

Here’s one book by JK Rowling that won’t sell a gazillion copies.

A set of fairytales mentioned in the final Harry Potter novel, which have been handwritten and illustrated by JK Rowling, are to be auctioned off to raise money for a children’s charity.

The author has handwritten and illustrated just seven copies of the Tales Of Beedle The Bard.

It is her first work since the last Harry Potter book was published in July.

While one copy will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London next month, the others will be given away by Rowling to those most closely connected with the Potter books.

Her agent? Someone at the publisher? Daniel Radcliffe? Melissa from The Leaky Cauldron? I can say with some confidence that I am not on that list.

The Tales Of Beedle The Bard played a central role in the seventh book about the boy wizard, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows.

Only one of the five fairytales, The Tale Of The Three Brothers, is recounted in the book.

Now for the first time, Rowling is revealing the four remaining untold stories which make up the set.

They are The Fountain Of Fair Fortune, The Warlock’s Hairy Heart, The Wizard And The Hopping Pot, and Babbitty Rabbitty And Her Cackling Stump.

Rowling said: “The Tales Of Beedle The Bard is really a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, and writing it has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I have loved and lived in for 17 years.”

The aforementioned Leaky Cauldron has more. One presumes that a non-handwritten version will hit the bookstores presently, but the AP version of the story makes it seem like that may not be the case. It also mentions that Rowling is back at work:

Rowling said she was working on a new book, “a half-finished book for children that I think will probably be the next thing I publish.”

One way or another, she’ll be back in bookstores.

Well, this is a surprise.

J. K. Rowling, author of the worldwide best-selling Harry Potter series, met some of her American fans Friday night and provided some surprising revelations about the fictional characters who a generation of children have come to regard as close friends.

In front of a full house of hardcore Potter fans at Carnegie Hall in New York, Rowling, sitting on the stage on a red velvet and carved wood throne, read from her seventh and final book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” then took questions. One fan asked whether Albus Dumbledore, the head of the famed Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, had ever loved anyone. Rowling smiled. “Dumbledore is gay, actually,” replied Rowling as the audience erupted in surprise. She added that, in her mind, Dumbledore had an unrequited love affair with Gellert Grindelwald, Voldemort’s predecessor who appears in the seventh book. After several minutes of prolonged shouting and clapping from astonished fans, Rowling added. “I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy.”

I confess, this possibility had never occurred to me. Not because I think there’s anything inherently ridiculous about it, but because I just never gave any thought to the relationships of the adults, other than those who were directly connected to Harry’s parents. Which, I might add, were about the only adult relationships examined in any detail by Rowling. So it was just never on my radar. And for what it’s worth, if having “no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past” is evidence of gayness, then one could make the same case for Voldemort. Without bothering to look, I’m sure more than one dedicated fanfic writer has already explored the possibilities of Dumbledore/Voldemort slash. I’ll leave the rest to you. Pete has more.

This is fascinating on many levels: Bill Watterson, the reclusive genius behind “Calvin and Hobbes”, makes a rare public appearance to write a review of a new biography of Charles Schulz, the genius behind “Peanuts” who inspired him to be a comics artist. Check it out. Thanks to Mark Evanier for the link.

Turns out (also via Evanier) that Schulz’s son dislikes the result; apparently, he “expected vanilla and got Rocky Road”. All I can say is that this makes me want to read it even more. More specifically, over here, Monte Schulz says “Honestly, the quote I’ve really wanted to give the press, after reading both the early of the manuscript and the final book, is this: ‘The book is stupid, and David Michaelis is an idiot.'” Yowza. It doesn’t appear that Monte’s message is getting through, however. You’ll have to judge for yourself. And those were two more links from Mark Evanier.

Technically, John Anderson isn’t someone I know, since I’ve never actually met or spoken with him. But he’s the cousin of my buddy Michael Croft, and that’s close enough for me. His book is called Follow the Money, and it’s about the migration of Texas politics to Washington, DC, after the election of George W. Bush. It got a nice review in the Statesman over the weekend, and for those of you in Austin, he’s going to be at Book People tonight (details here). Check it out.

Someone I definitely do know personally is New Orleans food writer Pableaux Johnson, though I knew him as Paul Johnson back when we were both students at Trinity. His book is called ESPN Gameday Gourmet, and according to the Houston Press, it sounds like the sort of recipes I could get my head around. If you like this sort of thing, then this is probably the sort of thing that you’ll like.

Nice piece by Stephen King on the Harry Potter series, the generally uninteresting reviews of those books, and the future of reading. Check it out. Link via dghall.

Say what you will about JK Rowling, she hasn’t been sitting on her laurels since she finished the last Harry Potter book.

J.K. Rowling has been spotted at cafes in Scotland working on a detective novel, a British newspaper reported Saturday.

The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling’s, as saying the creator of the Harry Potter books is turning to crime fiction.

“My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel,” the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival.

“It is great that she has not abandoned writing or Edinburgh cafes,” said Rankin, who is known for his own police novels set in the historic Scottish city.

[…]

In an interview with The Associated Press last month, Rowling said she believed she was unlikely to repeat the success of the Potter series, but confirmed she had plans to work on new books.

“I’ll do exactly what I did with Harry — I’ll write what I really want to write,” Rowling said.

As a fan of the Potter series as well as of British crime fiction, let me say that I’m looking forward to this book. I rather doubt she’ll make an appearance at Murder by the Book for a signing, but I’ll be sure to take a look at it when it debuts anyway.

Now here’s a question for you. Which do you think is more likely: The book will receive undeserved praise from critics who are giving her credit for all things Harry Potter, or the book will receive unjust derision from critics who are mad that she isn’t writing any more Harry Potter? I lean towards the latter, but could be persuaded otherwise.

Dwight Silverman has a reading list of novels for geeks that you might like. The criteria for making the list is a bit elastic – from affecting the geek culture and language (the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy) to being about a geek in some fashion (The Catcher In The Rye) to being about technology and its effects on society (Neuromancer), among other things – but they all fit. As with most lists of Books You Should Have Read, I haven’t read most of them (though I have read the four-(should have been five)-book Asimov trilogy that descends from I, Robot); maybe this one time I’ll try to do something about that. I draw the line at the Tolkien stuff, however – I tried, I really did, to read The Hobbit a few years ago, and failed miserably before the end of chapter two.

Anyway, if nothing else, this should be some good debate fodder. And if you want more, check out his earlier list of 15 geek movies to see before you die, which has more stuff I’ve watched than the book list has stuff I’ve read. Check ’em out.

It’s done: I have finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Our copy arrived from Amazon UK yesterday, and after Tiffany announced that she didn’t intend to start reading it till Monday, I pounced. I’m happy to have finally caught up with everyone else, and to be able to freely read what’s out there without worry about being spoiled. I won’t say any more about it here.

I do have a few spoilery thoughts to add, which are in the extended entry. DO NOT CLICK ON unless you’ve finished reading.

(more…)

I figure by now that about half the US population has read the last Harry Potter book. As we like the British editions, we’re waiting on our copy’s arrival from Amazon UK (according to an email I got yesterday, it has been dispatched and is estimated to arrive via international mail on or about July 30). In the meantime, I’m doing whatever I can to remain spoiler-free. I’ve stopped reading newspaper stories about the book, even stories about midnight madness events at bookstores, just in case. That may sound excessive to you, but one of the Chron stories from Thursday quoted from early reviews of the book, and what they excerpted from Michiko Kakutani’s review in the NYT talked about how the saga ended, and that’s already more than I wanted to know, even if it was one of the scenarios I figured JK Rowling had to use.

So, I’m trying to maintain complete radio silence on all things Potter for the next week or so. I’m also going to have to wait till Tiffany reads the book first once it gets here, but at least she reads fast. If you’ve already read it, feel free to gloat about it in the comments, but please please please don’t say anything more about it than “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it”. Thanks.

I know that I will have to be very careful about seeing spoilers online for the last Harry Potter book when it comes out. But I had no idea people had experienced this sort of thing when the previous one came out.

Lisa Miller arrived later than she should have for the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on July 16, 2005 — a slip-up she rues to this day.

It took about 20 minutes for Miller, 26, to get inside the London bookstore where she bought the sixth book in J.K. Rowling’s juggernaut fantasy series. But before she had the novel in hand, a crucial plot point was ruined for her.

“Some ‘lovely’ person drove past where we were queuing and shouted the spoiler of who died in HBP,” Miller wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press. “It was so horrible to think of it being true that even when I read the book, I still held out hope that they were making it up!”

Pranksters pulled similar stunts worldwide. In Dallas, a driveby spoilsport yelled “[spoiler spoiler spoiler]” to fans gathered outside a Barnes & Noble. A blurry, shaky video of the verbal assault can be found on YouTube.

Now, as the July 21 release of the seventh and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, approaches, fans who have waited the better part of a decade to find out the ultimate fate of Harry, his friends and his nemeses are taking no chances.

But how far do they have to go? Must they close their eyes, cover their ears and scream, “LALALALA?”

[…]

Many fans don’t want to give up the excitement and camaraderie of a midnight release party, but they know they’re putting themselves at risk.

“We advise people — I know this is terrible — to bring headphones to the book release and put them on as they leave the store so they’re not subject to the idiot across the street screaming the end to them,” said Melissa Anelli, a webmaster of the Leaky Cauldron, a prominent Harry Potter fan site.

Good Lord, I had no idea. As with all previous installments, our copy of Book Seven is on order from Amazon UK, so I won’t have the idiot-at-the-bookstore problem to worry about. But man, I can’t believe there are people like that out there. To me, this is the equivalent of defacing a painting. Why in the world would anyone do that?

Anyway. What evasive measures will you be taking to avoid having the book’s end spoiled for you?