Reading Addict

I’m currently reading Ben Ehrenreich’s debut novel The Suitors, which uses Homer’s Odyssey as a sort of back story.  Ehrenreich uses Odysseus’s wife Penelope as the focus, what became of her when Odysseus left for war.  Although this book is much more than a retelling of perhaps the greatest epic ever told, it got me thinking on how many great, unique books have used someone else’s work as an entry point.  And while we love to roll our eyes at anybody that uses the word in casual conversation, I really can’t help but think that these retellings, these template-borrowing novels are but another characteristic the literary postmodern tradition.             

Here are some other works that probably should use the words ‘loosely based on’ or ‘inspired by’ as a disclaimer: 

Doh!; or, Thank you, Homer:-The Following use the Odyssey…

Ulysses-A novel by James Joyce. A notoriously ‘difficult’ yet brilliant book.  O Brother Where Art Thou-A Film by the Coen Brothers.  Cold Mountain-A Novel by Charles Frazier and a movie adaptation starring Jude Law.  2001 A Space Odyssey: A film that uses many parallels to Homer’s epic, adapted from the novel by Arthur C. Clarke. 

Ahoy!; or I am Ahab:-The Following use Moby Dick…

Ahab’s Wife; or the Star-Gazer: A Novel: A book by Sena Jeter Naslund that spins a tale from the perspective of Captain Ahab’s wife.  Leviathan: A concept album based on Melville’s masterpiece by the band Mastodon.  Bone: A graphic novel series by Jeff Smith.  The main character’s favorite book is Moby Dick. Allusions and references litter the long running series.  Leviathan ’99: A spinoff by Ray Bradbury that takes place in space. 

To Sit in the Shade; or, A Woman’s Influence: -The following use Pride and Prejudice… 

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Mayhem: (I think the title says it all.  And yes, that is the title).  Bridget Jones’s Diary:  A novel and film that use a serious Mr. Darcy, a meddling matchmaking mother, and a humorous detached father.  Bride and Prejudice: A Bollywood version of the classic novel.  Pemberley; or, Pride and Prejudice Continued: A novel by Emma Tennant.  (Note: There are numerous ‘Mr.Darcy’ and ‘Pemberley’ novels by different authors.) 

Abandon All Hope; or, Drag me to Hell!:-The following use Dante’s Divine Comedy… 

What Dreams May Come: A film starring Robin Williams that uses Dante’s concept of different levels of hell for different mortal transgressions.  The Amber Spyglass: A novel by Phillip Pullman contains many allusions and even has scenes that parallel those of the Divine Comedy.  Master of Verona: A book by David Blixt has Dante himself as a character and also borrows extensively from Shakespeare.  Dante XXI: An album by heavy metal band Sepultura is loosely based on Inferno (Note:  Also, see works by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton) 

To Be or Not to Be; or, Call me Will:The following use Shakespeare’s works…

(Note: Open your eyes, turn on your TV, read ANY book, and I guarantee you’ll find dozens!)

Christopher Moore is one of the most underappreciated authors of our time.  I first read Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.  If the title doesn’t offend you, then I highly recommend you read it!                       

After that I had to see what else he had written.  I discovered the world of Tucker Case in The Island of the Sequined Love Nun.  Poor Tucker, a geek in a cool guy’s body, finds himself involved in an illegal and just plain odd scheme on a tropical island where at least one fruit bat talks.   That led to The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, introducing me to a delightfully bizarre little town in California named Pine Grove.   One of the funniest characters is a woman who was once famous for her Zena like role, now fallen on hard times and heavily medicated.  She is the one who discovers the invisible, giant lizard that is disguised as a trailer and whom soon falls deep in lust with her….and the resolution of that physical challenge had me chuckling to myself for weeks!           

Stupidest Angel and Stupidest Angel 2.0 (No idea why-they appear to be the same book) also had me laughing for quite awhile—the heartwarming story of Christmas cheer—with brain eating zombies.           

My favorite so far, and the one I recommend over and over again to anyone who will listen, is Dirty Job.  Charlie Asher is a beta male whose life comes crashing down when his wife dies in childbirth and he is left to raise a daughter on his own.  No one will believe him when he claims that he saw a man in the hospital room—a man who took her favorite CD.  As the story grows Charlie finds he is one of a number of people who have the gift of collecting souls from the dying or recently dead—souls that reside in an object of great importance to the person.  This can be tricky—what do you do if it is the silicon implants that glow with the red of a soul? And what exactly does it mean when two hellhounds show up at your door to play with and protect your precocious daughter? Evil forces living below the city of San Francisco just add to the hilarity.            

You Suck and Bloodsucking Fiends are set in that same San Francisco, with some mild crossover characters.  Vampires are seen in a new …er…light in these very funny stories.  I particularly liked the minions, who were given their own voice in several chapters, adding a great perspective to the story.  

His website is good also, www.chrismoore.com.   Christopher Moore is not for everyone—his books contain weird sexual situations, somewhat graphic violence, and what some might consider heretical viewpoints.   If none of that bothers you, please give him a read!

 One of the earliest memories I can recall is riding around in my dad’s car while he sang, atrociously I might add, along to the Beatles.  It was all down hill from there.  Before I discovered how much I love deftly crafted written words, I fell in love with music.  I was practically weaned on classic rock.  Zeppelin, Sabbath, the Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix….I can go on and on.  And then I became the proud owner of a CD player and I found out about liner notes.  Man, I poured through all my CD’s, reading all the liner notes to find out who the band thanked, who they acknowledged, who helped record the album, who guest drummed on track 4.  I would then go and buy CD’s of these unknown bands, based solely on the fact that, say Nirvana thanked them in the liner notes of Nevermind.  (Of course, this was before the almighty internet where you can download a whole album, listen to snippets, and delete it if you don’t like it in the span of five minutes.)

The reason for this stroll down nostalgia lane is that I’ve come to do a similar thing with books.  I’ll see previously unknown authors offering words of praise to books that I enjoy too.  Because we are obviously brethren in superior taste in literature, I will seek out the books by these unfamiliar authors and see what they have to offer.  Sometimes they are good, sometimes we merely share affection for the same novel.  But sometimes, there are blurbs on these book jackets that bug the heebie jeebies out of me and have me running for the hills.  The following overused, hammered-into-the-ground, make-your-ears-bleed-if-you-hear-it clichés should as of now be stricken from book blurbing.  (I hereby decree and will see to is that it is good.):

-A Tour-de-force…

-…Wildly inventive…

-A unique voice… 

You are authors! Wordsmiths. Crafters of the word. You can do better!Fortunately, a cliché on the back cover doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad book. Take a look below, these great books suffered from lazy, lackluster, uninspired blurbs on the back. 

Try the Tour-de-Force’s:Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Without Remorse by Tom Clancy

The Sibling Society by Robert Bly

Blindsight by Peter Watts 

And don’t forget about the Wildly Inventive books:

Flying by Eric Kraft 

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Dying for Chocolate by Diane Mott Davidson 

And of course, the ‘a unique voice’’s:

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Collected Poetry and Prose by Wallace Stevens

My Life in France by Julia Child  

Let this be a lesson future writers and reviewers, keep your thesaurus handy!    

I’ve always thought of myself as a sophisticated reader – that is, able to handle a heaping helping of uncertainty and doubt in my literary diet… strong enough to withstand the Happily Ever After desires of Harlequin Nation. 

But… nope. Two books I’ve recently read prove otherwise. Instead, I’ve been plunged into a Bizarro World: the literary novel I was supposed to have enjoyed merely frustrated me… and the romance novel I read just to stay on top of popular authors delighted me to no end. 

What??!? This has caused a crisis of not-epic proportions. 

Okay, the novels. I was eager to read Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You  on the strength of several positive book reviews (New York Times, I’m looking at you) and his literary-club cred.  

And it started out incredibly strong – beautifully written, well-drawn characters, a fascinating setup. The gist is an older man, a successful director of commercials and musicophile, happens upon the club performance of an up-and-coming rock/pop/folk singer, a younger woman, and begins to correspond with her through various means – leaving her notes, email, web page messages. It is a charming flirtation for them both, with the promise of them eventually meeting.  

(Spoiler alert…) 

A promise that does not get fulfilled. 

Is it really too much to ask of the author that the two MAIN characters of your novel actually, you know, MEET? But no! They never do! No resolution! No satisfaction! Grrr. Okay, so I argued with myself: the author did this on purpose, was commenting on the characters’ (and by extension, our current culture’s) narcissism, need for perfection, and general disaffectedness. They’d both built up such unrealistic expectations of each other, and invested so much fantasy in the people they’d created in their minds – it was bound to end unhappily. Furthermore, their feelings of extreme longing is mirrored in the reader (namely, me), hoping for a something – between the characters. 

Intellectually, I knew all this , but emotionally, when I got to the last page, I wanted to throw the book across the room. Preferably aimed at the head of Arthur Phillips. 

And then I read romance novelist Mary Balogh’s novel Simply Perfect, the fourth in her Regency Romance series where she marries off various Victorian-era schoolteachers to dashing young dukes and such. And it was delightful – some pretty decent writing, I must admit (no clunker clichés, such as heaving breasts and whatnot), and complex characters.  

And one more thing: the two main characters actually MEET. Engage in conversation. Go for walks. (And fall in love, of course.) Huzzah!! 

Next week, perhaps, I’ll go back to preferring uncertain endings, abhorring simple and tidy conclusions in which all is well that ends etc., but for now, at least, Bizarro Laura says: Ambiguity drools, Happy endings rule. 

Tulsa’s quaint, Episcopalian university sure has produced some remarkable people.  A Hall of Fame football player turned U.S. congressman, the pioneer inventor of voicemail technology, S.E. Hinton who authored the book on which Coppola’s seminal film The Outsiders was based (which also, incidentally, made the Admiral Twin drive-in a national landmark), and even Blanche Devereaux from the Golden Girls.  But one of T.U.’s greatest literary products remains largely unknown; and I’m sure he’d have it no other way.           

William Paul Winchester graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in Botany.  Upon completing college, Winchester had that strange ‘now what’ feeling, a feeling common for so many grads these days.  He worked as a substitute teacher and traveled a bit before deciding to build and operate a farm.  Now, as romantic as the idea sounds, after graduating I don’t think I can ever remember thinking to myself ‘Hmmm, maybe I’ll be a farmer now.’           

Winchester purchased some land from a local farmer and dove in headfirst. He built his farm house himself, living in a trailer at night while toiling in the Oklahoma summer’s heat during the day.   Before long he had some chickens, a cow, and taught himself everything from basic plumbing and construction to crop cycles.  He earned most of his meager funds from bee keeping, selling the honey in mason jars, earning a little extra income from selling the milk from his one and only cow.             

Although the subject matter is remarkably interesting (to me at least) the real gem in this small book is Winchester’s writing.  In his book A Very Small Farm he comes across as a modern day Thoreau describing his Southwind Farm as Walden Pond.  His menial tasks carry immense weight.  His descriptions and motivations humble the reader and conjure a time long past of romantic subsistence farming.  He lives an intrepid life, foregoing even electricity in his home, reading by candlelight at night, and drawing up schematics for a porch addition, a chicken coop, or a barn when it rains during the day.  Between journal entries, there are recipes for jams and pancakes, instructions for canning, when to plant what, and even the small joy and relaxation he finds when weeding his garden. This book is moving and humbling in the truest sense of the words.  His words are nonjudgmental of modern society, yet there is something deeply profound about his simple life as a small Oklahoma farmer here in the 21st century… Oh, and I think he may be my hero.