Having worked in the newspaper world before, being presently a freelance writer, who does get to deal with the occascional kook, though none quite as nutty as those that Roscoe Barragon deals with, I was immediately drawn into The Buzzing, a quirky, funny novel by Jim Knipfel. Loaded with movie references, especially those of the creature feature variety and about half a dozen intersecting conspiracy theories.
I love books about writers. I love books about monster movies. I love books about conspiracy theories. Throw them all together, and I will devour an off-beat gem such as The Buzzing like, well like Godzilla himself.
One of the ideas that has been kicking around my head for a few years now is a modern retelling of MacBeth that would either be a young adult novel or a screenplay, but I don’t think it’s ever gotten any further than a few scribbled notes here and there. Alan Gratz apparently beat me to the punch as his sequel to Something Rotten is Something Wicked, a retelling of the Scottish Play.
Something Rotten was the audiobook that kept me company over the past week, and if you hadn’t already figured it out, it is a retelling of Hamlet. I majored in English in college. So, I read Hamlet. A lot. Roughly once a semester, I believe. Something Rotten is a pretty cool Shakespeare retelling.
Horatio is a wise-beyond-his-years narrator and amateur detective who is a basically a teenage Philip Marlowe. He exudes cool and individuality. The other characters with slight name changes from their Shakespearean predecessors tend to be a little more one-dimensional. Still, I can see the book being a hit with teen boys, and being a nice jumping off point for high school teachers hoping to introduce Shakespeare to their students.
The book is actually very good, but there is one problem. It is billed in more than one place on the cover of my audio as a mystery, and certainly the style is that of a mystery, with one key problem. There is no mystery. There is a sort of half-hearted attempt to introduce a few other suspects, but these possibilities amount to nothing. I read a fair amount of mysteries, and the general idea is that there should be twists, turns and surprises, but that never really happens in Something Rotten. So, it’s a good book, but if you are a mystery reader and looking for a good mystery, this isn’t it.
There was lots to like about this book, though. The dark humor is fun, and should go over well with the young adult audience. I personally appreciated the They Might Be Giants reference. (I had to stop typing the previous paragraph when “The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas” came up on the Ipod.) There was also a fun reference to Shakespeare ripoffs.
Ok, have to go now because Mammal just came up on the Ipod.
Leo Tolstoy said that, “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Well, actually he said it in Russian, but not speaking Russian or having a keyboard with the Cyrillic alphabet, this is the best I can do. On a similar note, my mother has a wooden sign that hangs on the side of the refrigerator that reads, “As far as anybody knows, we are a normal family.”
Of course, there’s no such thing as a normal family, as anyone who has relatives should be well aware of, and that’s what makes stories about dysfunctional families so appealing. I just read the memoir Sweet and Low: A Family Storyby Rich Cohen which presents a history of his own not-so-normal family, who among other things are the folks who invented and made a fortune off of Sweet’N Low.
It’s a testament to Cohen’s writing and perhaps my own quirkiness that I found the history of artificial sweeteners so fascinating, but of course the real story here is the wackiness of this family and the business that they run. I loved the scene early in the book when the author’s older brother learned at an early age that the dice (or in this case the little scraps of paper) were stacked against him, and he was not the favorite grandchild.
Reading about the Eisenstadt clan reminded me very much of another family with a business of their own. I am talking about The Bluths, of course, subject of the now defunct television series Arrested Development. Not being much of a television watcher, I missed the series when it originally aired, but thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I have been working my way through the series on Hulu.com. The similarities are striking. There’s the FBI raid, the shady attorney and the cold-hearted matriarch. Arrested Development lacks an eccentric aunt living in a super-chilled room, but I think Buster makes a pretty good stand-in for Aunt Gladys.
Apparently, when short on inspiration, one need only turn to one’s own family for endlessly entertaining material. To avoid being disinherited as Cohen’s branch of the family was, you might want to change the names and some of the distinguishing characteristics of your family members. Cohen offers some tips for writing family memoirs in this Slate article.
I purchased a reprint copy of Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock some time back because it was one of those books that was on my to-read list for awhile. For those not familiar with reprint books, these are cheap, very bare-bones reprints of books that are out of print and, presumably, in the public domain, or perhaps so not in demand that the rights can be had for a song. I’ve seen these sort of books before, but never before actually read one. It’s not a pleasant experience.
First there are the covers. There’s this rumor that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but people do it all the time. My day job is pretty much based on the idea that you can judge a book by its cover. These reprint books tend to have the most boring covers imaginable. You would think these reprint publishers could simply find some halfway decent public domain artwork and slap that on the cover. While there are plenty of cover catastrophes out there as the Judge a Book by its Cover blog gleefully points out or as the recent flap over Justine Larbalestier’s book Liar has shown us, it seems that the least a reprint publisher could do is to make an attempt at creating a vaguely appealing cover.
The blahness, does not end there. It took me until the third chapter to realize that the strange beginning to each chapter was actually an epigraph. Because these weren’t italicized or set off in anyway from the rest of the chapter they just read as if they were the start of a perplexing paragraph. Similar lazy formatting in the book led to several points when the jarring “[Greek text]” would appear, just like that. I can’t even begin to read Greek text, but something tells me seeing it being printed there as opposed to this stand-in text would have helped the book to flow along just a bit smoother. I also kind of doubt that Mr. Peacock is to blame for the strange punctuation situations that periodically occurred leading to what appeared to be random emoticons in a nineteenth century novella.
All of this detracted from my overall reading experience and makes me think that this must be what reading an e-book is sort of like. I realize there are all sorts of improvements in the technology, but still I can’t help but feel that one must sacrifice certain standard book features when opting for a digital version of a book, and to me this takes too much away from the pleasant nature of the reading experience.
Are you an e-book reader? I am being stodgy and old-fashioned in thinking that good old fashioned books are still the superior medium?
Not that I have any plans to get married at any time in the near or distant future, (sorry Mom and Dad) but if I did I think I would have to take a page out of The Kheinz book and make sure that my ceremony was as fun and memorable as theirs.
It’s official. I am a bona fide author. I just signed my name after the words “Author’s Signature” on my very first book contract. Come 2011, the world will be able to buy my book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or their local bookshop. Until then, though, you will just have to content yourself with my mindless ramblings here.
I’ve got to assume that Denis Johnson has already sold the film rights to Nobody Move. This short, incredibly quick-based story reads like a screenplay. It’s almost nothing but action and dialog. With action that tends towards the exciting and snappy dialog that brings to life the cast of dumb criminals, the entire book flies along like a high speed car chase.
The review I read compared Johnson’s writing to that of Elmore Leonard. I think one of the most brilliant things Elmore Leonard has ever said is, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” Johnson has also apparently followed this rule, as there isn’t a single skip-worthy passage to be found in Nobody Move.
Nobody Move is a perfect summer read, just the perfect size for packing up in a suitcase or taking to the beach. It’s not a book to sit and savor on a cold winter afternoon, but something to breeze through on a hot summer day with a cool drink in one’s hand. It’s short and sweet with characters that are disturbingly real.
According to this article in the New York Times, Target is making some waves with their own book selections. Even though I spend a lot of time in Target and love books, I’ve never spent much time in their book section assuming it was just the usual bunch of bestsellers that I had no real interest in, but apparently the retailer has chosen some unlikely titles for their featured selections and, at least in one case, turned a dud of a book into a bestseller.
From what I read in the article it looked like all the selections were in the women’s fiction category, but I know Target carries other books as well. Does anyone know if they have featured selections in other categories? I am thinking YA and children’s, but there are other big categories like non-fiction and thrillers, where a Target featured selection could make a big difference in book sales. It’s a relatively small book section at Target, so I am guessing all their books and featured selections are going to come from the big publishing houses, but hey, if they are picking unlikely titles from big houses maybe they would look at titles from independent publishers as well.
Of course, it doesn’t look like authors have much control over whether or not their book gets picked as one of the featured titles or not, but it wouldn’t hurt to do some research into just how the whole selection process works.
Things have come a long way since I was a teenager. I remember the days when store managers viewed teen shoppers as nothing but potential shoplifters and watched us like a hawk as we browsed their wares. OK, I’m sure there still are stores like that, but Borders at least recognizes that teens are great customers and is rewarding them with an expanded section in many of their stores. Read the full article from the Wall Street Journal online here.
Of course, it helps that there all these great writers creating awesome books for the teen market right now. One of them is Ellen Hopkins whose Twitter post alerted me to the story. So, thanks, Ellen!
One of the quotes on the back of my copy of Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand describes the novel as a literary thriller, but that hardly does the book justice. Take a cast of wonderfully eccentric and completely original characters with more than their fair share of personal demons, stick them on a Maine island in the midst of a bitter cold November, throw in some mystery and murder, and you have an absolutely riveting novel.
My problem with traditional thrillers is that they aren’t always so thrilling. The plot twists are often far too predictable in my opinion, but as I entered part 2 of Generation Loss, the plot took a twist I wasn’t expecting, and from there on out the book continued to offer up surprises.
By the time I entered the second half of the book. I found myself making up excuses for why I needed to read just a few more pages, even when I probably should have been doing something else instead. It’s one of those books that’s hard to put down once you get into it. Even the ending fit perfectly.
Generation Loss is dark and disturbing, with a not entirely likable main character, who you will find yourself rooting for despite yourself. It’s a thriller without all the cheesiness and predictability of too many thrillers out there. It is a very good book.
Below is a video interview with Hand on Generation Loss. Picture quality is pretty poor, but the interview is worthwhile enough to ignore the grainy, poorly lit film:
Having worked in the newspaper world before, being presently a freelance writer, who does get to deal with the occascional kook, though none quite as nutty as those that Roscoe Barragon deals with, I was immediately drawn into The Buzzing, a quirky, funny novel by Jim Knipfel. Loaded with movie references, especially those of the creature feature variety and about half a dozen intersecting conspiracy theories.
Uncategorized | Alissa | 
July 31, 2009 6:02 pm | 
Comments (1) 
One of the ideas that has been kicking around my head for a few years now is a modern retelling of MacBeth that would either be a young adult novel or a screenplay, but I don’t think it’s ever gotten any further than a few scribbled notes here and there. 
Leo Tolstoy said that, “Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Well, actually he said it in Russian, but not speaking Russian or having a keyboard with the Cyrillic alphabet, this is the best I can do. On a similar note, my mother has a wooden sign that hangs on the side of the refrigerator that reads, “As far as anybody knows, we are a normal family.”
I purchased a reprint copy of 
I’ve got to assume that Denis Johnson has already sold the film rights to 
According to 
One of the quotes on the back of my copy of 
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