Archive for June, 2009
Book log: Pride and Prejudice… and Zombies
June 20, 2009 12:34 pm
Pride and Prejudice
and Zombies
by Jane Austen
and Seth Grahame-Smith
Even the cover design reflects Grahame-Smith’s general method. The copyright page attributes the portrait of a young lady to the Bridgeman Art Library, but also credits the book designer for “cover zombification.”
Clearly, the cut-throat marriage market of Regency England needed more literal throat cutting.
As the book’s first line now reads, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” And so it goes. Seth Grahame-Smith (author of several odd-looking books — seriously, check Amazon) has opened Jane Austen’s text and brought in an army of the undead. Ever wondered why Netherfield was vacant in the first place and ready for Mr. Bingley to move in? Zombies. Obviously.
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Book log: Of Harps and Rings
June 13, 2009 1:16 pm
Here’s the disclaimer, folks: this is me blathering about a couple of lesser-known books by one of my long-time favorite fantasy authors. I first picked up some of Patricia C. Wrede’s books some time in middle school, and have been lending them to all my friends ever since. (Seriously. Was there anyone who didn’t borrow the Enchanted Forest Chronicles in high school?) Hell, as Carmen can tell you, I even made friends through those books. That makes them magic. I also adore her Regency-England-but-with-magic books. As far as I’m concerned, Wrede is one of the masters of YA fantasy. (And as long as it’s well-written, I see no reason ever to grow out of YA books entirely.)
Some of Wrede’s earliest books are set in a secondary world called Lyra, and it’s two of these that have been hanging out on my shelf for a few years now: The Harp of Imach Thyssel and The Raven Ring. For whatever reason, I hadn’t read them until last week — or at least, I hadn’t read Harp. I think Elf also has a copy of Ring and let me borrow it once in high school, but I remembered only the barest shadow of the story. Like the cereal ad used to say, taste it again, for the first time. (Ahh, brain sludge.)
Although the two books share the same fantasy world, each stands completely on its own, set in different parts of the world and with no characters in common. They’re also separated by almost ten years of real world time (during which Wrede was writing many of the books we all enjoyed). If you read them back to back, it’s easy to see how much Wrede improves as a writer between Harp (1985) and Ring (1994).
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Movie review: Watchmen
June 5, 2009 12:23 am
Pug and I discovered this week that we have a dollar theater across the street. (For a loose definition of “across the street,” but you know, whatever.) It’s in the same complex as our neighborhood Target and a former mall that’s now a private school (yes, weird). For months, we’ve been driving past the sign for this place, but all it ever tells us is that Rocky Horror Picture Show is playing Saturday evening.
But Pug ran across the theater’s web site earlier this week, and sure enough, they’re a second-run theater, and they play all sorts of things beyond Rocky Horror. And this week they were playing Watchmen, which we hadn’t seen yet, so we went.
The theater is an empty place on a Tuesday night, the lobby dark and cavernous. Walls plastered up and down with old movie posters. You could have a long game of “I spy the poster for such-and-so” in that lobby. You’d be sitting on fat red sofas and armchairs scattered around the lobby, or maybe perched on the stairs leading up to… the projection rooms, I assume. I don’t know why the staircase was in the middle of the lobby. There were signs apologizing for air conditioning problems in some of the theaters — from the fan in the back of ours, we assumed we were in one of the afflicted rooms. But there were few enough people there, it didn’t even get unpleasant.
And the movie itself? Read on…
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