weekly book review: pride and prejudice and zombies, by jane austen and seth grahame-smith

It's only been out for a little while, but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has already received so much Internet buzz that I feared my little review would be a bit redundant. However, I get paid in orange cream soda and Monopoly money to write for this here weblog, so I guess redundancy is the price one must occasionally pay for being a follower of pretty to think so. I simply can't be the first one to report on each and every trend, doves. ACTUAL paychecks must be earned, else the repo men come and carry my laptop away, and then where would we be?

I'll tell you where. Holding a lovely orange cream soda, however Internetless. That's where. (Shudder.)

Anyway, I have quite shamelessly cheated on my New Year's reading resolution by reading Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies rather than finishing Austen's original novel, something I've been half-heartedly trying to do for roughly ten years or so. It was, however, a necessary shortcut seeing as I suffer from Britlitaphobia. Makes me all twitchy and glassy-eyed and irritable. Not pretty. BUT, since the addition of zombie mayhem makes most things better, I figured it could only improve Austen's beloved classic.

And did it? Why yes. I'd say so, yes. And here's some proof:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." So begins Austen's novel. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." So begins Grahame-Smith's version. Clearly, both are good, however, the second is obviously much, much better. It's a truer statement with fewer commas and more zombies. Better.

In the original, Elizabeth Benet is a feisty, witty, fiercely independent young lady who will not stand to be insulted. Which is good. But in P&P&Z, she's all of these things PLUS a blood-thirsty zombie slayer, trained by a Shaolin master in China to protect her beloved England from a never ending hoard of "unmentionables." Which is clearly better.

Darcy is still Darcy, but here he cracks jokes about the male anatomy and threatens to cut Miss Bingley's tongue out if she doesn't stop her idle chatter. Lydia is still Lydia, but now her empty headedness is rewarded by spending the remainder of her years married to an invalid, forever changing his soiled bed linens. Charlotte is still Charlotte, except it now makes more sense why she would marry the clearly revolting Mr. Collins: in Grahame-Smith's version she becomes infected, is slowly turning into a unmentionable, and wants a taste of married life before she joins Satan's army. So, her decision to marry a boring, chubby sycophant finally makes some sense. Better!

Furthermore, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has pictures:

"Mr. Darcy watched Elizabeth and her sisters work their way outward, beheading zombie after zombie as they went."

...as well as discussion questions at the end:

"Some critics have suggested that the zombies represent the authors' views towards marriage -- an endless curse that sucks the life out of you and just won't die. Do you agree?"

Which, again, makes it bet-ter.

In all honesty, I'm not sure how well the joke will hold up for someone who hasn't already read (at least in part) Austen's original novel, but if you 1) are in possession of a sense of humor, and 2) are already familiar with the source material, I think it's fair to assume that you'll have fun reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It's exactly like reading a Jane Austen novel, except better. It's actually interesting.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

2009, 319 pages

weekly book review: the somnambulist, by jonathan barnes

"The many men, so beautiful. And they all dead did lie. And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I."

For the most part, the books on my list of resolution reads are heavy, depressing, beastly things, and I found myself needing a break from all of that. Enter: The Somnambulist.

Set in Victorian-era London, The Somnambulist chronicles the (mis)adventures of Edward Moon, a magician past his prime whose true passion is solving crimes, and his sidekick The Somnambulist, a massive, milk-guzzling, hairless mute who is able to endure impaling with neither injury nor pain. Add a bizarre murder, an albino, a menagerie of circus freaks, prostitutes, assassins, poets, a creeeepy Utopian cult, a man for whom time passes backwards, a medium, and various assorted psychopaths and you have The Somnambulist - a novel that is part Frankenstein, part Sherlock Holmes, and one of the strangest, freakiest, funniest, and most overall enjoyable books I've read so far this year.

The narrator, both unnamed and unreliable, begins his tale with a warning: "This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre." And although Barnes' prose is far from pedestrian, all those other things are pretty much true. This, of course, is what makes it so much fun to read.

Full to overflowing with twist, turns, and red herrings, Barnes' story more than once risks becoming a bit too absurd, yet he somehow manages to pull it all off. Well, mostly pull it off. The only notable exception to this would be the ending, which wasn't quite as satisfying as I'd hoped it would be. Still, I found Barnes' debut to be a clever and wholly pleasant diversion, and its flaws easy enough to forgive.

In short - I liked it. I liked it a lot.

The Somnambulist

Jonathan Barnes

2007 (paperback), 353 pages

weekly book review: a confederacy of dunces, by john kennedy toole

The title of this post is factually incorrect, since this will not be much of a book review at all.  See,  a few friends and I recently decided to form an online book club, and "Dunces," our first selection, is presently up for discussion.  I could write something more involved over here, but I'd rather not steal anyone's thunder.  (Thanks again, Paul.)  Nonetheless, I thought I might share a few quick thoughts for those readers uninvolved in my weird little club.   

And so, my thoughts:

Overall, I found A Confederacy of Dunces to be a very enjoyable read.  Perhaps it dragged in spots, but it was, all things considered, a fantastic comic farce, and I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it.  As much as the protagonist begged to be hated, I found that I couldn't, and I enjoyed spending time in his wacko world almost as much as I was thankful that he didn't really exist in my actual life.   Did it deserve the Pulitzer?  Hard to say.  However, and despite its challenges, reading it was a worthwhile experience, and one I would certainly recommend.

monday book review: i was told there'd be cake, by sloane crosley

I don't know about you, but this last week was a bit of a kick in the gut for me.  A variety of things combined to get me feeling rather lousy, and it didn't take very long for me to realize that the Dick Cheney book I was reading wasn't exactly helping my situation. In search of something to lift my spirits, I turned to Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake, a collection of essays you may remember being reviewed over at "Chasing Paper" by the lovely Ms. Carrie.  And wouldn't you know, Crosley's light and airy essays - written on subjects ranging from summer camps to bridesmaids to vegetarianism - proved to be just what I needed. 

Though not hilarious exactly, Crosley's stories are cleverly amusing, odd enough to be entertaining but universal enough for most anyone to find them relateable, and the storyteller herself comes across as being witty, charming, and just self-deprecating enough. After reading her collection, Sloane Crosley has officially secured herself a place on my list of 'famous chicks I'd like to have beer with.' (Which is really quite the little honor, I'll have you know. It's a fairly short list.)

And since this is one of those times when I feel examples speak louder than descriptions, here's a passage that made me chuckle. It comes from a essay titled "Bastard out of Westchester", in which Crosley describes a childhood spent growing up in a bland suburb and the subsequent disappointment she feels over the news that her family will not be moving to Australia after all:

If I ever have kids, this is what I'm going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil - preferably the soil of some place like Oostende or Antwerp - destinations that have the allure in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you've been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the women are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever.

This is where I want to raise my children - until the age of, say, ten, when I'll cruelly rip them out of the stream where they're fly-fishing with their other lederhosened friends and move them to someplace like Lansdale, Pennsylvania. There, they can be not only the cool new kid, but also the Belgian kid. And none of that Toblerone-eating, Tintin-reading, tulip-growing crap. I want them to be obscurely, freezingly, impossibly Belgian. I want them to be fluent in Flemish and to pronounce "Antwerpen" with a hint of "vh" embedded in the "w."

Why go through all the trouble of giving a ten-year-old an existential heart attack by applying culture shocks like they were nipple clamps? Because, ten-year-olds of the world, you shouldn't believe what your teachers tell you about the beauty and specialness and uniqueness of you. Or, believe it, little snowflake, but know it won't make a bit of difference until after puberty. It's Newton's lost law: anything that makes you unique later will get your chocolate milk stolen and your eye blackened as a kid.

And I can't help but think that my Grandpa Nestor, himself a Belgian immigrant whose uniqueness was largely lost on the playground bullies of his youth, would have whole-heartedly agreed.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Sloane Crosley

230 pages, 2008

monday tuesday book review - things i've learned from women who've dumped me, edited by ben karlin

Getting dumped sucks. No matter your age, gender, or the size of your emotional investment, there’s little worse than listening to someone tell you that she’s tried you out, found you to be less than favorable and would like to return you now. And although we’d all like to be able to claim that we’ve never been dumped - that we’re far too desirable to ever be the dumpee, it’s an experience that’s happened to the best of us at one time or another, and one we can all relate to regardless of race, religion, or sexual persuasion. (And if you tell me that you’ve never been dumped, then I’m calling you a liar. Also, your pants are on fire.)

But being dumped - although very painful - can also be very funny, especially after traveling a comfortable distance of time. And so, with a list of contributors that is nothing if not promising, Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, a collection of relationship-based essays compiled and edited by Ben Karlin (former editor of The Onion and former executive producer of The Daily Show), certainly had potential. Unfortunately, and as was the case with all my ex-boyfriends, potential isn’t enough.

Just like any relationship, the book certainly had its high points. Tom McCarthy’s recollections on the Christian Camp girl who got away in “Don’t Leave Too Much Room for the Holy Spirit” made me laugh out loud and was my personal favorite, while Neal Pollack’s “Don’t Come on Your Cat” and Patton Oswalt’s “Dating a Stripper Is a Recipe for Perspective” were also particularly enjoyable, but I found these occasional gems to be too infrequent to sustain the entire collection. Many of the essays were fine enough, however not great, and some – like Stephen Colbert’s gimmicky contribution – were downright disappointments.

Overall, Things… is an easy, breezy read that is sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, but sometimes falls short, making it a bit too spotty for my overall taste.  So I dumped it.

Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me
Edited by Ben Karlin

2008, 223 pages

monday book review: when you are engulfed in flames, by david sedaris

With this, his most recent collection of sardonic essays inspired by his life, I am officially starting to worry that David Sedaris may be running out of ideas.  

Undoubtedly, fans of Sedaris will eventually pick up his newest collection.  Unfortunately, fans of Sedaris are already long-since familiar with his family, his boyfriend Hugh, and his humorous struggles to learn the language while living in France.  And since When You Are Engulfed in Flames includes several essays about his family, his boyfriend, and his struggles to learn the language while living in a foreign land (Japan this time, but even still), I was left with the unmistakable feeling that Sedaris was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Furthermore, all of the essays in this collection have already appeared in either The New Yorker or This American Life, so for hard-core Sedaris fans there's probably not a single new piece to be found.

For those who haven't already read the essays in this collection, they are standard Sedaris - witty, dry, the mundane turned humorous.  Like the Van Gogh on the cover, some of the stories here are downright creepy - Sedaris' retelling of his brief stint in a morgue, the story of his awkward friendship with a Normandy neighbor who turned out to be a pedophile, and the one where he recalls various pervy experiences gained while hitchhiking to name a few, and reading these is more of a uncomfortable experience than a humorous one.  Certainly, there are some gems to be found, and "The Smoking Section" where he writes about his attempt to stop smoking by moving to - of all places - Tokyo was, for me, the most enjoyable.  But even still, I felt like I had heard it before.  Like the novelty had worn off a bit.  

But this isn't to say I didn't enjoy reading When You Are Engulfed in Flames.  It may be spotty, but for my money spotty Sedaris is still better than a lot of the crap that's out there.  It's just that we're often hardest on the ones we love the most, you know?

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris

323 pages, 2008

monday tuesday book review: born standing up: a comic's life, by steve martin

I was born in 1978, a particularly good year for comedian Steve Martin.  That was the year he won a Grammy for Best Comedy Album with Let's Get Small, the year he released "King Tut" on 45, the year he appeared in the movie Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, made so many appearances on SNL that he seemed more like a regular fixture than a guest host, and was basically as successful as any comedian can hope to be.  But since I wasn't exactly cognizant in 1978, all this was lost on me.  By the time I was old enough to appreciate popular culture Martin had long since traded in his stand-up career for one in film, so my early memories of him are more of the Little Shop of Horrors variety rather than the comedic banjo/magic act sort.  And so, I entered into this autobiographic recount of his stand-up career with slight apprehension.  I love Steve Martin but had never seen his stand-up routine, so I wondered if a story about this particular era of his life would be slightly lost on me. 

As I came to learn, Martin's early career made for a pretty interesting read, even for those who were not yet self-aware in 1978.  Before making it big, he more than paid his dues working in a Disneyland magic shop, performed some of his earliest material in a Knott's Berry Farm theater, made endless and often unsuccessful appearances on daytime variety shows, and strove to create a original brand of comedy that relied more on quirky non sequiturs than on punch lines.  He was also a student of philosophy, loved art and poetry, suffered from severe panic attacks, had a complicated and poignant relationship with his father, and very nearly gave up on show business before finally making it big.  On top of learning these interesting facts about Martin, his autobiography also revealed that he's a great writer who comes across as a genuine, wholly likable, and all-around good guy.

You may have noticed this by now, but I clearly prefer fiction to non-fiction, and biographies/autobiographies are generally not my thing at all. It's not that I don't find true stories interesting - I do! - it's just that I'd rather enjoy my stories of celebrity life in episodes of E! True Hollywood Story form rather than in book form. But I needed a book for the plane and had heard good things about Born Standing Up, so when I noticed that it happened to be available at my local library I rolled the dice and picked it up.  

And the verdict?  Born Standing Up is a very enjoyable read that can easily be digested in a few hours, making it the perfect airplane read.  If you are a Martin fan, it's definitely worth your time.

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Steve Martin

224 pages, 2007

monday book review: mcsweeney's joke book of book jokes

A quick look back at my past few reviews made me realize I've been reading some pretty heavy stuff as of late, so it might be time to lighten up. That realization, coupled with the fact that life has recently provided me with all sorts of ways to test my sense of humor, led me to McSweeney's newest release: The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes by the editors of McSweeney's - a collection of spoofs, lists and letters inspired by famous writers and works.

(Yes, I would be the nerd whose pulse goes all fluttery at the prospect of a book filled with jokes about books. Shut up.)

As John Hodgman writes in the book's introduction,

(T)hese are all original pieces of humorous writing that are joined together merely by their appreciation of the intrinsic and unique hilariousness of books...We all know that books are funny. First, they are made of paste and cloth, which is funny, as is the fact that people still read and buy them. Also, books connote a sort of intellectual stuffiness, which is always easy and appealing to make fun of. It's humanizing.

He's being silly, but it's also the truth. Making fun of Jean-Paul Sartre's morose intellect, Ernest Hemingway's bloated male ego and Emily Dickinson's poetic melancholy is fun - especially if you're someone like me whose education has forced her to read No Exit more times than she cares to recall.

Fortunately, not all the jokes revolve around James Joyce (although several do), so an English major is not necessarily a prerequisite. In fact, my favorite pieces are ones like Thirteen Writing Prompts and A Serial Killer Explains the Distinctions Between Literary Terms, where the joke comes more from literary devices rather than specific books or authors.

Of course, the actual book jokes are fun too, with Jean-Paul Sartre, 911 Operator; Rough Drafts Of Jenna Bush's Young-Adult Novel; Bedtime Stories By Thom Yorke; and Phrases On The Marquee At The Local Strip Club To Cater To A More Literate Crowd being among my favorites.

In short, if you're a fan of McSweeney's and at all literary-minded, it's very much worth your time. And now I'll close with my favorite piece from the book, written by Andrew Tan:

Holden Caulfield Gives the Commencement Speech To His High School

You're all a bunch of goddamn phonies.

The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes

By the Editors of McSweeney's, with an Introduction by John Hodgman

2008, 217 pages

monday book review: ovenman, by jeff parker

Antihero When Thinfinger is a bit of a loser, although a lovable one. After being kicked out of the house by his parents for accidentally getting both arms covered in horribly mangled tattoos, 15-year-old When found himself forced to take a job in fast food and has been there ever since. Although a maestro in a restaurant, he's basically hapless in everything else. He's a skater who keeps losing his boards; his bulimic girlfriend sleeps in the living room, plagued by dreams that he's trying to kill her; he's the lead singer in a band who will only let him repetitiously sing the word "Wormdevil," the band's name; and nearly every morning he finds himself reliant on the post-it notes his drunken self has affixed to his body in an effort to clue him in on the previous night's shenanigans. Although a terrible boyfriend who consistently steals here and there from the pizza restaurant that employs him, he's a fairly good guy; but when he wakes up one morning to discover a pizza box full of stolen money on his coffee table, things take a bit of a turn.

Despite being hailed as "uproariously funny," Ovenman is probably not the sort of book that would have made it into my shopping basket had it not been for my bracket in The Morning News's Tournament of Books. (Yes, it's sort of like a college basketball bracket, and yes I realize it's incredibly nerdy. Shut up.) Of course, this funky little book was quickly taken out in the first round by Denis Johnson's epic Tree of Smoke, I was intrigued at the description and figured I'd check it out.

Basically, I have this theory that there are some things that are better on airplanes. Sprite? - better on an airplane. Individual packets of peanuts or pretzels? - better on an airplane. Tiny bottles of liquor? - good, but definitely better on an airplane. Hand-held gaming devices, Sudoku puzzles, tabloid magazines, and novels by Jennifer Weiner and Helen Fielding ? - all nice enough, but for some reason far, far better when enjoyed on an airplane. It's something about the tiny, enclosed space where you are forced to sit and enjoy something completely and entirely in one sitting that makes all these things more enjoyable than they would be most anywhere else. I feel similarly about Ovenman. It was a good read, but as strange as it sounds, I have a nagging feeling that it would have been ten times better if I would have read it on an airplane. For whatever that's worth.

Ovenman, by Jeff Parker

242 pages

2007

monday book review: an arsonist's guide to writers' homes in new england, by brock clarke

Sam Pulsifer begins his faux-memoir with an explanation: he’s a convicted murderer, arsonist, and not much of a literature fan. Sam is also a “bumbler,” and I suppose that accidentally burning down the Emily Dickinson House and killing the two people still inside was his ultimate bumble. For his crime, Pulsifer serves ten years in a white-collar prison, and upon release discovers he is widely reviled by the denizens of his hometown of Amherst, MA, explaining "...in the Massachusetts Mt. Rushmore of big, gruesome tragedy, there are the Kennedys, and Lizzie Borden and her ax, and the burning witches of Salem, and then there's me." However, it appears that he is only mostly reviled. During his prison tenure, Sam's father had been inundated with a strange form of fan mail - folks offering him money in exchange for burning down other authors' homes: Hawthorne's, Twain's, Alcott's, and the like. Although surprised, Pulsifer refuses to see himself as an arsonist and chooses to ignore the letters, focusing instead on trying to build some semblance of a normal life by going off to college, getting married, buying a house, having a few kids, and staying the hell away from Amherst. But his reasonably happy existence is eventually shattered when, twenty years after his crime, the son of his accidental victims shows up on his doorstep seeking vengeance. His arrival sets off Pulsifer's downward spiral and sparks the mystery of who has resumed his work of burning down famous authors' homes, leaving Sam to assume the blame.

An Arsonist's Guide..., although fiction, reads like a memoir, and takes satirical jabs at memoirs, book clubs, English professors, and literary fads such as Harry Potter. It received gushing reviews from a wide variety of critics, and while it aims to be humorous, I felt it occasionally fell flat. Sam's (or, rather Clarke's) tone is strangely detached while telling his life story, and although this takes some getting used to, it does allow for certain passages to be funnier than they may have otherwise been. Take, for example, Sam's description of life in prison:

I learned something from everyone, is the point, even while I was fending off the requisite cell-block buggerer, a gentle but crooked corporate accountant at Arthur Anderson who was just finding his true sexual self and who told me in a cracked, aching voice that he wanted me - wanted me, that is, until I told him I was a virgin, which I was, and which, for some reason, made him not want me anymore, which meant that people did not want to sleep with twenty-eight-year-old male virgins, which I thought was useful to know.

See? It's that special brand of straight-faced humor that sometimes works for some people.

I could say more, but since these little reviews seem to get longer by the week, I'll just say that, overall, An Arsonist's Guide... is something that many English majors and book geeks just might love; however, although I am both those things, there was something about it - be it the tone, the wimpiness of the narrator, or the combination of the two - that kept me from feeling such depth of affection.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Brock Clarke
2007, 303 pages

books: then we came to the end

How you feel about short and sweet today? You know, 'cause I'm so short and so sweet?

Alright? Alright...

Lightening Quick Synopsis:
Told in the first person omniscient, Then We Came to the End (Joshua Ferris) is the collective story of the employees at a failing Chicago ad agency where increasing layoffs breed increasing paranoia, rumors, drama and obsessions over who has the better chair. Think Office Space meets Catch 22 meets The Virgin Suicides.

This book has been getting a fair amount of hype - positive reviews from the New York Times, a strong endorsement from Stephen King, and glowing praise from a plethora of other reviewers - but frankly, I just didn't see what the big deal was. Was it funny? Sure. Was it clever? Enough. Was it an engaging story? At times. But the best part came when the point-of-view shifted from the satirical collective to the singular voice of the boss - a lonely, work-obsessed, consummate professional who falls into a tailspin when facing a diagnosis of breast cancer. That section was honest, gripping, and generally unputdownable. However, as a whole, the use of the first person omniscient - although achieving the desired anonymously detached voice - tended to annoy me a bit, the characters were largely stereotypes, and despite the aforementioned exception of the boss' character I just couldn't bring myself to care about any of them.

So overall, it wasn't bad. It just wasn't great.

Up Next: What is the What, by Dave Eggers

books: 8 down, 16 to go: the areas of my expertise

For the unfamiliar, John Hodgman (who most would recognize if nowhere else, as PC from the Apple commercials) created a completely absurd and thoroughly silly almanac of absolutely pointless fake trivia and titled it The Areas of my Expertise. In his almanac, Hodgman includes sections named "Beard Manual," "How to Raise Rabbits for Food and Fur: The Utopian Method," and "Basics of Snow and Ice Warfare," to name a few.

Although it should not have, it seemed to take me an absurdly long amount of time to read The Areas of my Expertise. And I can't even blame it on all the time I've been spending recently grading papers, finding a cure for the common cold, and inspiring millions of poor, repressed villagers to rise up and overthrow their cruel android dictators. No, it took forever to read because nearly every single sentence in Hodgman's fake almanac is so gosh-darn funny. In fact, I fear I was terribly annoying to be around while I was reading it because I would frequently break down into hard-to-control fits of giggles, and would make anyone who was near listen while I read sections aloud. I'm sure I was tiresome, but Nathan did a very good job humoring me. For that I am thankful.

As if you even care:
-My favorite individual sections were "Secrets of the Mall of America," "Films in Which I, John Hodgman, Have Made Cameo Appearances," "Hobo Matters," and "Common Short and Long Cons."
- My favorite chapter was "What You Did Not Know about Hoboes"
- My favorite hobo names (of the 700 provided) were as follows: Colin, that Cheerful Fuck; Pantless, Sockless, Shoeless, Buster Bareass; Experimental Hobo Infiltration, Mr. Wilson Fancypants; Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick; The Unanswered Question of Timothy; Rex Spangler, the Bedazzler; Skywise the Sexual Elf; Feminine Forearms Rosengarten; Abraham, the Secret Collector of Decorative China; Socks Monster; Tom the Gentle Strangler; and Nick Nolte.
- And, although I used to think otherwise, I now contend that I would choose flight over invisibility

And were you aware that there is a website displaying artistic renderings of 800 of the 700 hoboes named in the novel? Because there is.

Up Next: The Dead Fathers Club, by Matt Haig

books: 5 down, 19 to go: the zombie survival guide

My lovely zombie buddy (In the sense that we are both intensely interested in zombies, not that he is a zombie. At least, I don't think so...) was kind enough to lend me his copy of Max Brooks's The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead for this year's book #5. The book delivers exactly what the title promises, tips and strategies to fight off, defend oneself from, and overcome a zombie threat. It reads exactly like a manual and, indeed, there is exactly one joke - a joke that, in my opinion at least, was funny enough to carry the book. Additionally, it was a real eye-opener for me, since I have discovered that due to the inaccessibility of my attic, my general ignorance of firearms and the fact that I have not yet secured a refuge on a remote island, I am currently woefully unprepared in the event that there is a zombie attack in my future. But since I am a fighter and refuse to be paralyzed by fear, consider my training underway. (And please do let me know if you'd care to pool resources.)

Next Up: Lost and Found, by Carolyn Parkhurst (on loan from my lovely Amazing Race buddy)

a book club of one: king dork

On the recommendation of a friend, I have just finished King Dork, a novel with a painfully dorky teen protagonist who hates The Catcher in the Rye and the people who idolize it, most likely because he doesn't recognize how Caufield-eque he really is. I guess the novel is Young Adult, but as a high school literature teacher I've read enough YA lit. to know quality from crap and this is quality. As a person who a) teaches painfully dorky boys, b) witnesses the horrors of high school on a daily basis behind the safety of a teacher's desk, c) enjoys a good mystery/comedy/coming-of-age story as much as the next gal, and d) adored The Catcher in the Rye so much that she considered naming her first born son "Holden," it probably goes without saying that I really enjoyed the novel and would highly recommend it to others (unless you take issue with "colorful language" and scenes depicting awkward, teenage intimacy - i.e. - Mom, you might want to pass on this one). Oh, and did I mention it was written by Frank Portman of The Mr. T Experience? 'Cause it was.

JMW over at A Special Way of Being Afraid does this thing called "Archive of the Week" where he posts excerpts from books he likes, and I thought I'd steal that idea for this post. Here's my favorite insightful/angst-ridden/poignant passage from the book. Enjoy.

The title of The Catcher in the Rye comes from a misquoted poem by Robert Burns, which Holden Caufield elaborates into a mystical fantasy about saving children from falling off a cliff. There are all these kids playing in a field of rye, and he stands guard ready to catch them if they stray from the field. A lot of people have found this to be a very moving metaphor for the experience of growing up, or anxiety about the loss of innocence, or the Mysterious Dance of Life. Or any random thing, really…. The brilliance of it, though is that the people in the Catcher Cult manage to see themselves as everybody in the scenario all at once. They're the cute, virtuous kids playing in the rye, and they'’re also the troubled misfit adolescent who dreams of preserving the kids' innocence by force and who turns out to have been right all along. And they'’re also the grown-up moralistic busybody with the kid-sized butterfly net who is charged with keeping all the kids on the premises, no matter what. Somehow, they don'’t realize you can'’t root for them all.

Say you'’re a kid in this field of rye. You try to find a quiet place where you can be by yourself, to invent a code based on "“The Star-Spangled Banner," or to design the first four album covers of your next band, or to write a song about a sad girl, or to read a book once owned by your deceased father. Or just to stare off into space and be alone with your thoughts. But pretty soon someone comes along and starts throwing gum in your hair, and gluing gay porn to your helmet, and urinating on your funny little hat from the St. Vincent de Paul and hiring a psychiatrist to squeeze the individuality out of you, and making you box till first blood, and pouring Coke on your book, and beating you senseless in the boys'’ bathroom, and ridiculing your balls, and holding you upside down till you fall out of your pants, and publicly charting your sexual unattractiveness, and confiscating your Stratego, and forcing you to read and copy out pages from the same three books over and over and over. So you think, who needs it? You get up and start walking. And just when you think you'’ve found the edge of the field and are about to emerge from Rye Hell, this AP teacher or baby-boomer parent dressed as a beloved literary character scoops you up and throws you back into the pit of vipers. I mean, the field of rye.

Sound good? I'’m sorry, but I'’m rooting for the kids and hoping they get out while they can. And as for you, Holden old son: if you happen to meet my body coming through the rye, I'd really appreciate it if you'’d just stand aside and get out of my fucking way.