More Books and School-type Stuff

I like zombies and one time I read Pride and Prejudice so a girl would think I was a sensitive, intellectual-type. So, when I heard the Internet hype-machine buzzing about Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies I felt obligated to pick up a copy.
To me, the idea of mashing up Jane Austen's comedy of manners with comic book style living dead violence is hilariously groundbreaking. It's like Victorian England meets World War Z meets The Hood Internet. Fuck, I love living in the 2000s.
As for the book itself, I only have this to say: too much witty banter, not enough heads getting chopped off. The plot of P and P remains relatively whole and intact, with wry, zombie-related snips being snuck in across the pages. After a particularly sassy exchange with Darcy, Elizabeth goes off and shoots some mo'fuckers in the head. Awesome, but not quite awesome enough.
The idea behind this creation is novel at best, a one-time flash in the pan, but a textual mash-up becoming this popular is a literary frontier. Don't expect to see War and Peace and Werewolves or Crime and Punishment and Pirates any time soon, but P&P&Z is definitely taking literature in very cool directions.

We live in a glorious age.

Revolutionary Road

This book fucking took it out of me. I picked it up on Monday and finished it the other night, in the later hours after coming home from the bar. As I read through the last handful of pages, I wasn't sure which character we would relate to more. Frank Wheeler, cynical and manipulative, who trudges through the monotony of his life due to lack of better option, plying himself with alcohol and illicit affairs just to get through? Or are we the hopeless April, stuck in a life not her liking, yet powerless, hopeless, to do anything about it? Maybe we're all John Givings, the once brilliant, now jaded, mental patient whose intellectual gifts are driven away by 'therapy'. Hopefully, none of us fully embody these three characters fully, but, rather, hold the qualities that make them appealing, that make them human, while being spared the characteristics that make them tragic. By all means, I hope we never find ourselves so fucked up and awful, but Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road offers us a brutal, cold portrayal of what can happen when you forget who you are.