Posts made in July, 2009

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...

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...

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 Story by Rich Cohen which presents a history of his own not-so-normal family, who among other things are the folks...

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...

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...