Boston Book Bums

Out last week is the graphic novel version of Jane Austen’s famed Pride and Prejudice and got us at B3 wondering, what inspires so many versions of this classic tale?

Austen authored 6 novels in total, starting with Sense and Sensibility in 1811 and her final 2 novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion posthumously in 1817.  Pride and Prejudice was her second novel and originally published in 1812, although it is said that Ms. Austen worked on the novel for 12 years before its publication.  All her novels are well-known thanks to classic story-lines, college lit classes and the numerous movie versions.

If you somehow live under a rock and are not familiar with the basic story of Pride and Prejudice, the quick and dirty is the five Bennet sisters are in need of husbands if the Bennet family is to keep its standing in genteel country society.  Mrs. Bennet begins to aggressively match up her daughters to ensure the family fortunes.  Elizabeth Bennet is the second oldest of the five sisters and she is a feisty one.  She becomes acquainted with Dr. Darcy, an uppity, wealth, genuine bachelor at a dance.  Here is where Austen may have forever changed the course of storytelling, creating a love/hate relationship full of misunderstandings between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy that has become the foundation of almost every romantic comedy written or filmed since.  Austen, famous for the complexity of her characters’ relationships throws in another dozen characters into the mix and mayhem ensues.

In 1940, Laurence Olivier played Mr. Darcy and Colin Firth shot to fame after his Dr. Darcy portrayal in the 1995 BBC version, which was the fourth BBC version.    Aishwarya Rai played an Indian Elizabeth Bennet in the Bollywood version, Bride and Prejudice.  And of course, Renee Zwelleger brought Heidi Fielding’s Bridget Jones Diary to celluloid in 2001.

In the last couple of years, Pride and Prejudice has become a popular literary mash-up source.  Pride and Prejudice with Zombies made quite splash in 2009 and other mash-ups have been turning out a lot quicker than Zombies move.  Now you can find Really Angelic, Pride and Prejudice with a Paranormal Twist and Mr. Darcy, Vamprye.  There is even a rumored film in the works that is a mash-up of Pride and Prejudice with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987’s Predator.

Why does Austen’s novel receive all this attention?  The love story is as simple and universal as Romeo and Juliet.  The themes of class, reputation and love are as potent in today’s society as Austen’s.  The manners may be outdated but don’t we all long for a little courtship in our lives?

• The late Jack Kerouac has created a bit of a mini-tourist-boom for his once hometown of Lowell (via Boston.com)
• The shining college on a hill here, Tufts, has a piece about the demise of the printed book (via Tufts Daily)
• Yes, Genesis drummer turned pop solo maven Phil Collins is penning a book about the Alamo. Wonder if he’ll mention it’s basement? (Hat tip to Pee Wee) (via Epoch Times)
• A book featuring the controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed is going ahead (via The Times)
• A woman in Tenessee pleads guilty to stealing $60,000 in books! (via Knoxnews.com)
• Borders will be cranking out 25 pop-up-shops during the coming holiday season (via Bloomberg)
• She’s a little it country and a little bit crafty too. Marie Osmond has cranked out a sewing book geared towards gifts for friends. (via UPI)
• If you are a lover of wines from the Pacific Northwest, then these books will pop your cork (via The News Tribune)

We approached Charles Brokaw’s The Lucifer Code with trepidation. Any book tagged with “Code” immediately makes us wary as another wanna-be Dan Brown, whether it’s the author’s desire or the publisher wish. But we figured the minute hook of a plot- people looking to assist Lucifer’s grand push for war on Earth- made The Lucifer Code worth a gander.

The Lucifer Code is Omen III meets DaVinci Code, with indelicate technique and heavy handed prose making for a very disappointing book.

The Lucifer Code centers on our hero, Prof. Lourds discoverer of Atlantis, as he becomes embroiled in a chase to find the Scroll of Joy. The scroll, you see, is another take on Revelations and how Lucifer will vie for control mankind during the End-Times and Lourds is snatched to help translate the trail of clues that hopefully lead to the scroll. Of course in the rush to find clues, which obligatorily winds through subterranean Istanbul, each feverish discovery and turn is so loud and fast it’s annoying.

Too many thriller authors seem hell bent on throwing slow paced scientific discovery out the window. Unraveling ancient secrets,  while under fire, should be more like a bomb squad technician in a war zone- threats melts away even as the bullets fly, while time and meticulous care are taken. Not the ham fisted rapidity of pulling tissues out of a box.

Into this plot a cast of characters, or caricatures, we are plunged. We get flimsy GI Joe-esque tough guys, cadres of religious zealots and button down devils. These are paper doll versions of humans, mixing and matching a generation of thriller cliches.

And then there is the young, gun totting, dancer-like-yet-busty IRA lass who kicks ass, takes names and eventually ends up in bed with our older hero. Yeah you guessed it, our hero is the proverbial brainy ladies man.

Unfortunately, The Lucifer Code, like many male-centric thrillers, follows a hero no matter how slimy, unattractive or pompous that gets every woman in bed at some point. Insulting to men and women. Leading to, of course, some skin crawling sex scenes that makes respectable literary trysts and erotica jump out of the bookcase, run across the room and slap this book in the face.

Our last beef is The Lucifer Code’s sloppy “history.” It is best exemplified by the repeated incorrect use of Constantinople. It is a city, not a person. Constantine I, son of Helena, was Roman/Byzantine Emperor. His capital city, Constantinople means Constantine’s City. Constantinople was not a king, as The Lucifer Code says over and over at one point. It wouldn’t have bothered us if it was a one time error, but this was blatant and repeated.

With obligatory secret societies running around, ridiculous gun battled galore, poorly fleshed out characters and implausible leaps; and a petro-politics-apocalypse The Lucifer Code sadly has nothing going for it.

Lucifer Code by Charles Brokaw was purchased for review by Boston Book Bums.

• Another burst of diversity in the comic industry comes with the creation of a new hero, this time a wheel-chair bound Muslim boy. (via AP)
• When a U.S. Army reservist wrote a classified busting book about his war experiences, the DoD wasn’t happy that it slipped under their radar. As a result, in the tradition of Schwarzenegger’s control over Pumping Iron, the DoD bought up the ENTIRE run of the book and destroyed them. (via ABC News)
• Here in Boston, books and bikes go together in perfect harmony. But in the UK, an author who left a laptop in a bike shop had his computer, and manuscript inside, stolen. (via BBC News)
• Paradise Lost and dirty rhymes? Say what! (via The Guardian)
• With leaf-peeping season kicking off, as we head to Vermont perhaps some Green Mountain State reading is in order? (via Times Argus)

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris: A collection of animal-themed short stories by David Sedaris.  Acerbic humor and insight into human behavior disguised as animal tales.  Sign me up.

Dark Road to Darjeeling by Deanna Raybourn:  We may be a little to the party since this is the fourth book in a series but a murder mystery in 19th century India sounds fun.  Plus we love to read about the Colonial British and all their accouterments, they had such style.

Exley by Brock Clark: Emotional exploration of men, in their 40s, not framed by typical mid-life crisis or infidelities, but the search for one’s self through a relationship with a father has increasing appeal to us. Clark seems to tap this emotional vein with an Iraq vet’s state-side search for his father.

Habit of a Foreign Sky by Xu Xi: The widening emotional chasms of a once skyrocketing executive who finds her life crumbling around her intrigues us. Curious about the cross-cultural take on family, career and personal worth.

Monday: We reviewed Books As Weapons, the fascinating, well researched history of the publishing industry during World War II.

Tuesday: Of course, we rustled up a good collection of upcoming books for our Jack/Jill Previews and assembled some interesting book news for the Bookish Intelligence Report.

Wednesday: As flu strikes America, people retreat into hamlets both mental and physical to survive. Our review of Sigrid Nunez’s Salvation City covers that very tale, which focuses more on the insular moments of societies implied collapse.

Thursday: Another round of the Bookish Intelligence Report, as well as an op-ed on the thriller genre’s change from Cold War godless battles to 21st century godfearing.

Friday: In our second edition of the Books to Box Office review feature, we read Chuck Hogan’s The Town and watched the big-screen adaptation by Cambridge’s Ben Affleck.

Walk into any bookstore and you will find walls of thrillers, techno-thrillers, crime-thrillers, legal-thrillers, etc. etc. They are penned by a bewildering number of authors, some genuinely gifted with action packed prose, others derivatives of established scribes. Matters not as people love their suspenseful action and labyrinth like twists and turns, despite varying degrees of quality.

When you look at the genre of literary thriller, certain elements move to the front. Action, suspense and tension are hallmarks of your standard thriller. Over recent years, the thriller stalwarts of Michael Crichton and Frederick Forsyth were eclipsed by the works of Dan Brown and similar writers. The merits of the newer generation of thrillers is hotly debated. Regardless, when it comes to conspiracy and occasionally implausible action, readers love it.

While the thriller has taken different forms in the 20th century, the turn from Cold War spies to religious conspiracies has marked a change in tone and quality of many popular thrillers. With the rapid ascent of Brown and his Langdon character, a dizzying number of knock-off, copy cats and mimics have sought new angles on the “concealed” history of religions.

In the United States, historically, your religion was something you practiced behind closed doors, freely executed, private and solemn. Yet with rises in proselytizing movements and changes in how religion fits into our daily lives, the use of religious devices in thrillers as 21st century versions of Cold War weapons of mass destruction has exploded in appeal to a wider audience.

Where in the 70s and 80s, Cold War thrillers were sweeping, terrestrial threats, tangible and even quantifiable. We knew that nukes existed, so the threat was “real.” Our mutual enemy was godless Communism and it was reflected in the fiction of the time.

The rise of the religious thriller has sometimes obfuscated fact and fiction to a relatively unwary religio-literate public. As religion relies on faith, faith can easily be passed off as blind adherence to myth. Or be hammered  passionately as celestial “truth.” As a result, you will find a myriad of readers eagerly consuming one religious thriller after another, occasionally hearing…”it must be true, the writer did great research.”

While not inherently dangerous, it is a worrisome sentiment when someone takes “fact” from a weakly constructed piece of fiction.

Using objects from religious history, whether it’s the Spear of Destiny or Zulfiqar, readers find comfort in devices that bridge the real to metaphysical. They, as consumers of books, may be spooked by worlds of elves and marauding fantasists viewing those constructs as “too fake.” Yet, introduce a gentle breeze of Abrahamic or Pagan mysticism into the world they inhabit, suddenly it becomes dramatically appealing and to some “true.”

And during the last three decades of the 20th century readers had Commissars and Premieres as bogey men, the 21st century has skulking assassins, self flagellating deviants and swarthy zealot terrorists. All caricatures. But all playing on the basic concept of good versus evil. Except now, instead of it being Warsaw Pact v. NATO, it is your God v. their God.

In looking at the current field, few religious-based thrillers do justice to the source material from which their twists and turns spring. However, is tweaking and playing with our current crop of faiths good or bad? Is it indoctrinating people to incorrect views of other faiths? Or, are we seeing the period of man re-purposing our current faiths to serve mythic purposes. If you look back a millennium or so, what we view as “myth” today and freely exploit for entertainment, like Greek Pantheon, was “fact.” So, perhaps we are seeing the next evolution in faith in fiction and will this be a good way of separating the literary wheat from the chaff?

• Doesn’t take a swaying skirt or shirtless bloke to stop traffic in the UK but a big old pile of books. (via AP)
• From the biggest brains in the Commonwealth, MIT, a piece from their magazine about the rise of the e-book. (via Technology Review)
• Reading on an airplane? No book or e-reader is needed if Virgin Airlines has anything to say about it. (via Mediabistro)
• If you’re Dutch then the library is a good place, like any other country, to get a book. But what about a library in an airport. Dutch have that too. (via NYT)
• Where do the Chinese read? Online, libraries and something they call ‘book cafes.’ (via Xinhuanet)
• Do paperback originals get no slack from readers? (via WSJ)
• In the Big D, Dallas to most, a bookstore is showing how green it can be by offering an electric car charging station at its storefront. (via WFAA)