This Is Why They Invented The Internet

Some enterprising soul has rigged up a Choose Your Own Adventure over at OKCupid.

It is a zombie choose your own adventure.

And now my life is complete...er, literally. Dang zombies.

Your Score: Red Shirt

You killed 18 zombies and earned 14 manliness points!

You've contributed heavily to the excitement of the story, but ultimately died in the end. What can I say? I guess you weren't the main character.

Take another swing at the zombies?

Yeah, I Read Austenland. Kiss My Grits.

Austenland by Shannon Hale

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a reader in possession of a work of chick lit must be in want of a noose.

Yet somehow, I found myself checking this frothy novel out of the library and reading it in a day. Hey, it's a very short book, and besides, I loved Mr. Bennett in Pride & Prejudice.

Jane is a Manhattan singleton in her early 30s who keeps the BBC's Pride & Prejudice, starring perennial singleton crush Colin Firth, hidden in her apartment. One afternoon Jane receives a visit from a wealthy, elderly aunt who spots the DVDs, and immediately infers that Jane is a pathetic sap with unrealistic expectations about finding 19th century love in 21st century New York.

Then Aunt Carolyn dies, and leaves Jane a 3-week, all expenses paid vacation to Austenland, a Regency estate where guests dress in period clothing, swoon, play whist, and meet handsome landed gentry, played by actors. Jane hopes she can use the trip to separate her own romantic ideals from reality, and put the Mr. Darcy daydreams behind her once and for all.

The estate and its guests are weird and sad, and at first, Jane is keenly aware of this. However, she's read her Gothic romances, even Northanger Abbey, and finds she's exceptionally good at playing her role. She minces, she bats her eyes, she banters wittily, all the while reminding herself that none of it is real. Until she meets an unsuitable gardener, and a sullen, darkly handsome man who is, of course, infuriating.

The first 20 pages of the book are almost unreadable, but once the improbable set-up is out of the way, Austenland becomes rather charming, with fun period details and spirited dialogue. However, the characters are a little flat and underdeveloped, even our protagonist, whose ideas about romantic love seem more rooted in the 7th grade than the 19th century.

Still, it's fun, and enough off the beaten path of standard chick lit tropes that it doesn't feel tired. If you liked Bridget Jones's Diary, you'll get a kick out of this.*
__________________________
* A note on the original singleton, Ms. Jones. I tried to read Bridget Jones's Diary when I was about 20, and I practically threw it across the room. Then, I tried it again a few years later, and thought it was adorable. I'm still not sure if this means that I became a bad feminist after college, or if I just lightened up a little bit.

Art Imitating Life Imitating Art...Or Something

Call me crazy, but if I had committed a particularly brutal murder - and pretty much gotten away with it - I like to think that I would not have written up my homicidal shenanigans as a (bestseller) mystery novel.

A word of advice for all you out there who are considering fictionalizing crimes you've committed: don't make the murder/crime exactly like yours. Mix it up a little. Maybe you could add a sidekick?

Also - and I can't stress this enough - don't include details that only the cops and the culprit could know. That's a rookie mistake, like leaving part of your clown suit at the crime scene.

My question is...does this make anyone who read it an accessory after the fact?

I'm going to go with "Yes. Yes it does."

Everything's Fine, But It's Not Fine: 1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose

1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose (Aug. 2007)

I posted this review during the Blogathon, but since the post was only on top for 30 minutes, and since the book is astonishingly good, very important, and soon to be released, I thought I'd reprint it.

A reporter for the Times-Picayune since 1984, Rose has covered everything from the city's crime to its nightlife, and despite being a Yankee transplant, it's hard to imagine anyone with deeper pride in and love for New Orleans.

In the days immediately following Katrina, Rose and other reporters returned to the city to put out a paper, covering the news from their bicycles. By now, everyone has seen the images from the Lower Ninth Ward and the Superdome, and knows about the colossal, nightmarish tragedy of incompetence that followed on the heels of the storm. But what Rose writes about in his columns is a tragedy of a different sort.

After the Convention Center and the Superdome were evacuated, after the floodwaters subsided, the remaining population of New Orleans set about the task of putting their lives back together. The columns, published between 2005 and 2006, compiled in 1 Dead in Attic describe exactly what that process means, and the toll that it took on those who chose to rebuild in the face of civil unrest, civic inaction, and several kinds of bureaucratic hell. And to read Rose's columns is to watch a witty, intelligent, empathetic man slowly crack up under the burdens of stress, heartbreak, frustration, and loss.

In a straightforward and unapologetic voice, Rose writes about the "thousand yard stare" of survivors, the uncontrollable crying jags. The gamut of ugly, messy human emotion that rears its head after "the Thing" has range as well as teeth, and Rose's stories embody the gratitude, gallows humor, sadness, desperation, pettiness, and rage welling up in himself and those around him. Some of these stories are easier to get through than others.

In "Enough To Feed an Army," Rose describes finding a freezer-full of perfectly intact and gorgeous steaks a week after the storm, which he and friends cook up for the California National Guard to say thank you. It's a sincere, beautiful story, devoid of any schmaltziness. And there are other stories where Rose can't help but wonder at the wonder of it all. To be alive, to have hope, to go to Jazzfest is sometimes enough. Except when it isn't.

Despair peeks around the corners of a seemingly humorous column about going through airport security with a suitcase containing 15 naked Barbie dolls for his daughter while she and the rest of his family stay in Maryland with his parents. Later in the book, as post-traumatic stress and depression set in, Rose's humorous stories become scary-funny.

He accosts a random stranger he catches littering, participates in a passive-aggressive neighborhood refrigerator-dumping war, blacks out while covering a story and spends an afternoon on a sidewalk drifting in and out of consciousness. Rose milks these stories for laughs, and sometimes you catch yourself smiling even as a little voice in the back of your head says, "This isn't funny."

These stories culminate in Rose's widely syndicated essay on his decision to get help for depression, "Hell and Back." It's a remarkable piece of writing, and you can read it here.

The book is a must-read for those seeking to understand the aftermath of the storm, beyond FEMA trailers and the Superdome - the real day-to-day in a post-Katrina New Orleans. Tucked in there as well is a subtle message to the rest of the country about what New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast need today, almost two years after the storm.

In one column, Rose writes, "Tell them that New Orleans is still the best city in America. Tell them to come see for themselves, that we're happy, hopeful, joyful, and celebratory still. Then tell them this: New Orleans is a broken, suffering mess, weakened and scared... Got that? It's simple: Everything is fine here. But it's not fine."

More of Rose's column are available at http://www.nola.com/rose.

Clapton Is Godawful

Here's a rock and roll memoir you probably never expected: Pattie "Layla" Boyd-Harrison-Clapton hits the shelves in a few weeks with Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me.

I don't expect anyone to come out of this book smelling like a rose, but my money's on Clapton for being the true stinker, having basically stolen George Harrison's wife. Granted, George didn't seem to get the whole "matrimony means no extra girlfriends" thing, but writing and recording a song about your best friend's wife is just tacky.*

The Daily Mail has an excerpt here. I especially like the part where Clapton tells her, "Run away with me or I'll start doing smack" and then spends the next three years on the nod.

Classy.

---------------------------------------
* Also, "Layla" is kind of an overrated song, if ya ask me. Blah blah "got me on my knees" noodley-noodle, wanky-wank, LAYYYYYYYlla, piano outro and fin. It's no "London Calling" or "Born to Run" is all I'm sayin.

More Fun With YouTube

Okay, clearly we haven't quite caught up with our reading yet post-Blogathon.

But who needs book reviews when you can have trippy video footage set to a recording of Sylvia Plath reading "Fever 103"?

Dig it, man.

Neil Gaiman Lurves Books, But Don't We All

Ah, YouTube. What would I do without you? (Work, probably.)

Check out this clip in which an audience member at Comic Con asks Neil Gaiman how he got his imagination, apparently hoping that Neil will let slip the source of his Secret Writer Mojo (tm), so that said audience member can also become a well-regarded writer of fantasy novels, comics, screenplays, etc.

Gaiman, of course, fails to give the guy a straight answer. But then again, everybody knows that the best way to take someone's powers and add them to your own is to pluck their heart out of their chest, like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (Omnumshibah!) So you can see why Neil might not want to broadcast that sort of thing.*

Don't forget, Stardust (based on an enjoyable, if somewhat twee Gaiman novel) opens up this weekend.

--------------------------
* You know, this was funnier in my head. As it is, it kind of reads a little weird. Ah well.

(Note to Mr. Gaiman's lawyers: I'm totally kidding about the whole "Temple of Doom" thing. Besides, if a few semesters of college Anthropology taught me anything, it's that shrinking heads is actually the best way to gain the powers of your foes.)