What?!?!

Have you seen this? I don't even know what to say. I've been meaning to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for awhile now, and I thought this whole monster/classic hybrid thing was kind of cute. But this might be out of control now. A book about suicide and social morality AND robots? I just don't think this works for Tolstoy for the exact reasons Jay Parini states towards the end of the article.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/13/android-karenina-tolstoy-centenary-upgrade

What do you think?

Wonderful Fantastic Great Omens

By now, you are all well-aware of my guilty love for Supernatural, a TV show about brothers hunting down evil things while dealing with the question of their seemingly pre-conceived fates as weapons of heaven and hell. This season, the show's fifth, has centered around the beginning of the Apocalypse. Trust me, I understand how ridiculous it all is (hence my guilty love), but I can't help but watch this show compulsively and constantly. Anyway, all the episode reviews and recaps I faithfully follow constantly compare the show to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's much-loved novel, Good Omens. I knew I had to read it, so when I began this "Year of Reading Neil Gaiman," I added it to the top of the list. Then, luckily, a lovely friend lent me her copy of the book. I am so very very glad she did.

Because here's the thing: During the six days it took me to read Good Omens, I was completely and totally obsessed with it. I love this book. If it doesn't make my Top Ten list at the end of the year, I can't even comprehend the kinds of wonderful books I'd be reading the rest of the year.

At first glance, Good Omens shouldn't be the kind of book I love. It's a funny version of the coming Apocalypse, after all. But I didn't count on Gaiman and Pratchett to do what they did. Full of fantastic and absurd characters, ridiculous yet understandable situations, and an actual (even somewhat complicated) plot, it did nothing but entertain. Towards the start of the book, the newborn Antichrist gets switched with another baby, going to the wrong family unbeknownst to heaven and hell. In the middle of all this, there's Crowley the demon and Aziraphale the angel, two beings who've been on Earth since The Beginning, and they are way too accustomed to their worldly lives to give up on it now. Their pact (one might even call it a friendship) allows them to keep Earth on an evel keel so that heaven and hell can't take over too quickly. They attempt to stop the Apocalypse from happening in the 11th year of the Antichrist (a very imaginative boy named Adam), but of course, things go awry.

Meanwhile, the Four Horsemen are on the loose, the "Nice and Accruate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch" are dead-on, and some poor schmuck named Newt finally gets laid. By the end, we've got a ton of characters (I personally thought Gaiman and Pratchett had created too many characters and it became confusing), but they all add to some perspective as to how this whole thing goes down.

But the book's real virtues lie in its humor and the awesomeness of Crowley and Aziraphale. The book is hands-down one of the funniest things I've ever read. I laughed out loud through the entire thing. One sampling: "Crowley was currently doing 110 mph somewhere east of Slough. Nothing about him looked particularly demonic, at least by classical standards. No horns, no wings. Admittedly, he was listening to a Best of Queen tape, but no conclusions should be drawn from this because all tapes left in a car for more than a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums." I think I laughed for five minutes straight after reading that. And then I read it aloud to my entire family, who also appreciated it a great deal. The whole book is a lot like that.

Crowley and Aziraphale are fantastic characters, the kind you want to be BFFs with in the real world. Crowley, always in sunglasses and driving an old Bentley, is the epitome of cool and modern. Aziraphale, a rare books dealer, makes a nice foil, all nerves and common sense and morality. The conversations the two of them have in the first half of the book made up my favorite passages. There's nothing I love more in a book than just hanging out with two cool people (well, in this case, not exactly human people). Really, I couldn't have asked for more than having these two as my guides in this F-ed up world.

Anyway, to sum up, Good Omens fulfilled all I can really want as a reader just by being a great read at a time when I really needed some cheering up. Thank you, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I will be singing the praises of your novel for a very long time.

Poem of the Week: "Don't Look Back," by Kay Ryan

I wanted something short and sweet for this Poem of the Week, so I went straight to the poet who best sums up those two goals: Kay Ryan. Ryan can be a bit of a hard poet to get into, but I once saw her read at a little library in central Indiana, and she lit up everyone's cold spring night with her outgoing, slightly crusty personality. Here's a good one that feels especially poignant to me these days.

Don't Look Back, by Kay Ryan

This is not
a problem
for the neckless.
Fish cannot
recklessly
swivel their heads
to check
on their fry;
no one expects
this. They are
torpedoes of
disinterest,
compact capsules
that rely
on the odds
for survival,
unfollowed by
the exact and modest
number of goslings,
the S-necked
goose is --
who if she
looks back
acknowledges losses
and if she does not
also loses.

Tolstoy Link to Share

Here's a really good article from The Guardian about Tolstoy and how Russians view him. I really hope the film the article mentions, The Last Station, gets a release somewhere I can see it because it sounds fantastic.

Also, according to the article, Russian schoolkids read War and Peace when they are 14 or 15. Holy crap! When I was that age, there was no way I would have "gotten" that book.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/06/leo-tolstoy-the-last-station

Favorite Passages: Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

In this blog, I constantly refer to War and Peace and the lit class in which I was required to read it. However, I never mention that we read two other large and unwieldy novels in that class also: Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. I'm particularly fond of the latter. Our Mutual Friend is a massive, strange, suspenseful blend of mystery novel and social observation. Up until the last 100 pages or so, in which everything I thought about the book and its characters was completely obliterated by the author, I was in total rapture. And no part of the book made me happier than the terrific character of the creepy school teacher, Bradley Headstone. Besides having quite possibly the best character name ever, Headstone is a perfectly incompetent and murderous Dickens character. So, for this week's Favorite Passage, I decided to use the reader's first glimpse at Headstone, a wonderfully-written Dickens description.

From: Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

Bradley Headstone, in his decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent man of six-and-twenty. He was never seen in any other dress, and yet there was a certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were a want of adaptation between him and it, recalling some mechanics in their holiday clothes. He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might always be ready to meet the demands of retail dealers - history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left - natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in their several places - this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given him a suspicious manner, or a manner that would be better described as one lying in wait. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face. It was the face belonging to a naturally slow or inattentive intellect that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now that it was gotten. He always seemed to be uneasy lest anything should be missing from his mental warehouse, and taking stock to assure himself.

Suppression of so much to make room for so much, had given him a constrained manner, over and above. Yet there was enough of what was animal, and of what was fiery (though smoldering) still visible in him, to suggest that if young Bradley Headstone, when a pauper lad, had chanced to be told off for the sea, he would not have been the last man in a ship's crew. Regarding that origin of his, he was proud, moody, and sullen, desiring it to be forgotten. And few people knew of it.

The Magic of Neil Gaiman

Those of you who read my Favorite Passages post from this last Thursday know that one of my New Year Reading Resolutions is to plunge into the waters of Neil Gaiman's novels. I started off the year with one of his story collections, Smoke and Mirrors. It did not disappoint. Some of the pieces were just kind of bizarre, and as a newbie in the fantasy world, I didn't really get them. But the ones rooted in strong human emotion really stuck with me. Stories like "Troll Bridge," "Looking for the Girl," and the sad-but-hilarious "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories" get at the heart of disappointment, regret, and bitterness. I was also a big fan of "Mouse," "Foreign Parts," and "We Can Get Them for You Wholesale," all of which are good places to start if you're a Gaiman novice. Meanwhile, the strange but beautiful "Murder Mysteries," a detective story taking place in a pre-human city of archangels, completely hooked me from beginning to end. I couldn't get enough of it, to be honest.

I tend to forget how good Gaiman is at horror. Last month, I mentioned how deeply disturbing I found the images in Coraline to be. Smoke and Mirror's final story, "Snow, Glass, Apples," a horrifying take on the Snow White tale, picked up on that same disorienting break between reality and fairy tales. It was surprisingly intriguing.

Then, of course, there's the story Gaiman sneaks into his Introduction, a short real-world-based-fantasy called "The Wedding Present," which carries the most heart-wrenching finale in the entire book. Only a guy as nonchalant as Gaiman could bury such a story in a section most people never touch when they read a book. I love it.

Anyway, a good start to Gaimanpalooza. A good friend recently lent me some Gaiman novels to check out, and I just bought a copy of American Gods, probably his most famous adult novel, so I should be set for the next few months!

Poem of the Week: "Second Chances," by Richard Hugo

A few months ago, I mentioned reading Richard Hugo's White Center. One of the highlights I noted about the book came in the last lines of the poem "Second Chances." This is a lovely but deeply sad poem about its troubled writer, and I thought it was appropriate as lately I've been giving a lot of thought to misdirected lives and the idea of being someone I'm not. So, finally, here's that poem. I hope you like the ending as much as I do.

Second Chances, by Richard Hugo

I can't let it go, the picture I keep of myself
in ruin, living alone, some wretched town
where friendship is based on just being around.
And I drink there a lot, stare at the walls until
the buzzing of flies becomes the silence I drown in.
Outside, children bad mouth my life with songs
their parents told them to sing. One showers
my roof with stones knowing I'm afraid
to step out and tell him to stop. Another yells,
"You can't get a woman, old man. You don't get a thing."

My wife, a beautiful woman, is fixing lunch.
She doesn't know I dream these things. She thinks
I'm fine. People respect me. Oh, she knows all right
I've seen grim times. But these days my poems
appear everywhere. Fan mail comes. I fly east
on a profitable reading tour. Once in a while
a young girl offers herself. My wife knows that, too.
And she knows my happiness with her is far more
than I ever expected. Three years ago, I wouldn't
have given a dime for my chances at life.

What she doesn't know is now and then
a vagabond knocks on the door. I go answer
and he says, "Come back, baby. You'll find
a million poems deep in your destitute soul."
And I say, "Go away. Don't ever come back."
But I watch him walk, always downhill toward
the schoolyard where children are playing 'ghost,'
a game where, according to the rules, you take
another child's name in your mind but pretend
you're still you while others guess your new name.