Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and a poem

I finished reading ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’, the reworked classic of Jane Austen (by Seth Grahame-Smith). I liked the idea of the book, but not the actual product.
The reason ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is a classic is that it works at two levels. The first level is a love story where the characters fall in [...]

Almost non-fiction

The person who wrote ‘Bringing Down the House’, Ben Mezrich, is now writing a book about the start of Facebook. ‘Bringing Down the House’ is a bit nototious for its ‘literary license’ with truth and it seems the new book won’t be any different. I really like the way he responded to critics:
Last year, presented [...]

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer

A few weeks ago I finished reading the ‘Graveyard Book’ by Neil Gaiman (yeah, I know it’s for young adults) and last week I got ‘Who Killed Amanda Palmer’ by Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls. Neither of these things is surprising as I have two Dresden Dolls CDs and have 4 or 5 books [...]

The White Tiger, a review

I’ve been putting up reviews of books here  for myself for a while now and I thought I might as well do a post on them. I just finished The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, which I liked quite a bit–it actually reminded me a bit of Crime and Punishment for some reason. Anyway, here’s my one [...]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Really, how could you not want to read this book:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies covers the same ground as the original masterpiece – only that ground is full freshly-vacated graves.  The “strange plague” has been the scourge of England for years.  London has been walled off, and the countryside is littered with zombies (politely referred [...]

Hatuey and Hispaniola

I’m reading the book ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ and it reminded me of this quote by Hatuey (a Taino chief from Hispaniola during the genocide by the Spanish):
When he was tied to the stake, a Franciscan monk, a holy man, who
was there, spoke as much as he could to him, in the little [...]

George Orwell’s Diary

The George Orwell Prize is putting up George Orwell’s diary (I expected someone else’s) online. They will put up each of the entries 70 years after it was written and the first one is today. It’s an eye opener:
Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, [...]

A Bit Here and There

A few quick bits:

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature.
The glaciers on Greenland are melting faster than estimated. This is more important than the melting of the Arctic ice, because the ice here is on land so if it melts it could raise the sea level.
Syria now says Israel did not attack. What’s going on [...]

Guernica

Hmm, I had forgotten:
Four years after the fact, many of us have forgotten that the U.N. covered up its reproduction of Picasso’s giant Guernica during Colin Powell’s testimony in 2003. Indeed, many of us, including the media, find it convenient to forget that we’re still carrying on two wars.
Thanks for the reminder Maud and Ian.
This [...]