A couple of days after my last post in which I had a go at the world for inundating all of our favourite media with zombies in the hopes that a sprinkling of the undead would bring old ideas back to life, I got an e-mail from the author of one of the books I mentioned.

I was surprised! I mean, it's usually only friends or family who e-mail me after I write something, or post a quick comment when the post shows-up on my Facebook wall; I've never had anybody who I didn't know directly e-mail or comment on my stuff, let alone the author of a book I mentioned, who lives on the other side of the freaking world!

I was very surprised! And very excited! :D

Contrary to the belief of my friends who, upon learning about this piece of news through my tweet, suspected that I was being sued for some sort of illegality (if I got an e-mail from the publisher then maybe I'd be worried rather than excited. I'd still be surprised though), the e-mail was a very friendly one in which the author, Paul Freeman, was differentiating his work, Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers - A Canterbury Tale, from the myriad of zombie/monster fiction out there.

Here's what he wrote:

Hi Emanuel

I'm the author of 'Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers - A Canterbury Tale by Paul A. Freeman', and although your blog entry 'Too Many Zombies' may hold some truth, I'd like to be able to put my own book into context.

First and foremost, my novella is a Canterbury Tale, 'The Monk's Second Tale' to be exact, and is part of a much wider 'Canterbury Tales' project. So far I've written eight 'new' Canterbury Tales, all in different genres.

When Coscom Entertainment (a publisher of zombie fiction) asked me to write a narrative poem novella for them on the strength of a contemporary piece of narrative zombie poetry they published, I jumped at the chance. Chaucer never wrote about Robin Hood, so I decided to add this hero to my medieval-based zombie Tale.

Furthermore, unlike many of the monster mash-up novels, mine is not based on an already published book. The story of Robin Hood comes from a series of legend fragments, some of which I've incorporated into my narrative poem.

Anyhow, if any of your blog readers are interested, below is the link to my rather rudimentary website which explains my Canterbury Tales project, and a link to my book on my publisher's website - the Amazon and DrivethroughHorror links have a search inside facility of 4 and 6 pages respectively.

"I bid you now adieu and hope you'll speed
To Amazon and give my book a read."

Paul A. Freeman

---
Paul's website, 'Chaucerian inspirations':
http://paulfreeman.weebly.com/

Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers - A Canterbury Tale:
Coscom (includes links to eBook versions), Amazon, Barnes & Noble

---
I'll admit: I had to Google 'chaucer' (which then led me to the original Canterbury Tales) to find-out who and what Paul was talking about. Once I found Chaucer's impressive resume though, I was surprised that I was never taught about him at school.

Taking a look at the book on Amazon, it's been received pretty favourably: 4 5-star reviews, and 1 1-star review (there's always one). Then again, the 1-star review talked about how it wasn't like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Given my opinion of Pride (I'm almost at the end of it now, and my indifference still holds), that review actually works in the book's favour.

Continuing again on the subject of books, but back to the one about zombies, I made the judgement that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was lacking in zombies. In my own mind I extended this opinion to the genre as a whole - the 'insert-zombies-here' genre - but I may have jumped the gun on that one. You see, while waiting for the doors to Kick-Ass to open (an awesome movie by the way; everyone who meets the age requirement should go see it), I stumbled across this while perusing the shelves at the nearby Whitcoulls:

Really?

If the image isn't clear enough for you to see, the title of that book is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. Reading the blurb on the book reveals that it is a prequel to the events of the original parody, set several years before, when the zombie plague that seems to have taken hold of English society was just starting.

When I saw that book, I started to think that the publishers were really milking the whole idea - much like how the market seems to be flooded with vampire romance books a la the Twilight series. But then when I got home and tried to find the title on Amazon, I found that the Jane Austen + monsters 'genre' was far from alone.

The search results listed a book which re-wrote the Robin Hood tale to have him and Friar Tuck be zombie killers, another book gave Huckleberry Finn a zombie partner-in-crime, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was given a good dose of mummies, and The Wizard of Oz became The Undead World of Oz.

Without having to be tied-down to any original text, Dawn has the potential to be funnier for me than Pride, but as soon as I saw those search results, I was hit with zombie fatigue.

I'm tired of everyone trying to insert zombies into things to try make a quick buck or extend the life of some long-dead idea. Adding the undead to something doesn't necessarily make it more alive! Sure I've only read 1 'insert-zombies-here' book, but the gamer side of me can give you a laundry list of zombie titles that I really don't think are worth the megabytes of storage on your disk drive or the DVDs they are printed on.

My pet peeve, Call of Duty: World at War, has Nazi zombies in them... NAZI ZOMBIES! It's bad enough that developers have been churning out WWII games longer than WWII itself has lasted, but then to insert zombies into them to get that little bit of post-mortem movement from a dead horse that's already been beaten more times than a drum is a kind of necromancy that should be as illegal as necrophilia.

On that note, if by some crazy circumstances the real zombie plague just happens to start because somebody was screwing over that horse (or any other idea-corpse) too hard because they already inserted zombies into everything, then they deserve to have their brains eaten-out by that exact same corpse when it turns into a zombie.

There'd be a certain irony to that.

Update: From the blog of sci-fi author, John Scalzi:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Graphic Novel, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, adapted by Tony Lee, Illustrated by Cliff Richards (Del Rey)

Really? I mean, come on, now, guys. Really? Also: Really? Out May 4.

REALLY?!?!?

Continuing the story of my acquisition of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, it should be noted that I almost didn't buy those books. I was maybe 10 steps away from walking out of Borders without having made any purchase when my wandering eye just happened to catch Pride sitting on the table of special deal titles. I was really glad when I managed to find it, and Sense on that same table, that my frustration with Borders, and book stores / retail in general, didn't bubble-up to the surface where I could turn it into blog material.

Just this lunch time though, when I was wandering once again through Borders during one of my routine do-you-guys-have-this-book sessions, those frustrations resurfaced and I found myself asking: why aren't book stores organized like libraries?

The Dewey Decimal System: it works bitches!

I raised the question to my family, who quickly responded that it's because of the 'store' part of book store, and that retail stores make their money by making things as difficult as possible for their customers.

By 'difficult', I don't mean laying bear traps on the floor and having a swarm of angry bees attack you as you look around. No, stores make things difficult through their layouts which are planned in such a way that there is as much crap between the entrance and the item that you seek, and that the distance between those 2 is just long enough that it's right before the point in which you start tearing-out your hair in frustration before going home or going to a competitor's store where you'll likely subject yourself to the same frustrations, except against a different backdrop.

For browsing type shoppers, they're probably fine with this, but for hit-and-run type shoppers like myself who won't even enter a store unless there's something in there that I'm 105% looking to buy, this annoys me to no end. I mean, at the library, I can search through their catalogue ONLINE, find the EXACT title I'm looking for, and have their system tell me if it's available. If it is, I can go to the library and easily FIND the title in their building. This is all done for FREE.

By comparison, Borders' catalogue is only available to in-store shoppers, so I HAVE to go to their store. Then when I do a search, I'm presented with A METRIC CRAP-TONNE OF INEXACT MATCHES and the results tell me if the items I don't care about are in stock or not. If the item I'm looking for just happens to be in that list of results and it is available, I try look for it myself. As is often the case, a title can be found in SEVERAL DIFFERENT PLACES depending on whether or not it's on special. Even then I often find myself asking one of the store assistants if they can locate what their system says should exist somewhere on the shelves, and if they didn't get the memo that the title went on sale that very morning and so all copies of it were heaped amongst several non-related-but-also-on-special titles of the bargain tables, then I might as well have just asked a donkey if it could point me in the direction of Alaska. At the end of this complicated dance, I have to PAY for the book.

I sincerely hope that a large chunk of that money goes towards the author, because I came there to pay for the content of the book, not the annoying experience of having to find it in a store laid-out so inefficiently that it felt like I was in a labyrinth and feared running into a minotaur (or David Bowie).

You know what was terrible about the whole Pride and Sense purchase? I was leaving the store, not just because I couldn't find those books on the shelves, but because I couldn't find those books on the shelves AFTER their catalogue system told me that neither were in stock...

Fuck you Borders; you've killed my inner child.

With the gift of books from my family last Christmas, I've started thinking of building-up a book collection like proper fans of books do. You know: get a bookshelf, fill it with books you've actually bought. As opposed to what is, and has been, my habit of the last several years of going to the library and reading everything for free.

So a few weeks ago I went to Borders and made my most recent (and only, if you exclude text books or gifts for other people) purchase of books: the 2 books from the Jane Austen + monsters series thus far: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Matches made in heaven?

Firstly, I chose these books because it was just a few days before when I was discussing with laundry lass and her friends about this series in particular. I was able to tell the story of how I was introduced to these by an audio book of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which was played during my New Years holiday when my mates and I were sitting under the sun: we lol'd while we lolled.

Secondly, I bought the books during a sale at Borders because when you go from getting your books for free (or a few dollars on the occasions that I had to reserve items or get them ordered in) to having to pay, ANY dollar amount above $10 per book for me feels like waaaay too much to pay for all those pieces of paper. Feeling like I do about book prices, maybe I should've bought an e-reader instead... if only they sold the good ones in New Zealand.

Anyway, I've been slowly reading through Pride these last couple of days, and while the twist of having the story set during some zombie plague is definitely interesting, the impression I'm getting so far is that the zombies feel less like a clever plot device and more like a small recurring joke weaved into the boring bits of the story.

I mean, zombies are mostly encountered during what I imagine in the original novel as uneventful trips between towns/estates, and/or are only given a few paragraphs in which they appear. Within those paragraphs the zombies quickly get dispatched by our heroine Miss Bennett, and then the story continues as if nothing happened.

Maybe it's just like this in the part I'm currently up to, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 the way through the book, and I'm starting to think, Dammit, I'm not reading a zombie book, I'm reading Pride and Prejudice! The bastards have managed to get me to read Jane Austen!

If the publisher's ploy all along was to get someone like me to read Jane Austen, then kudos to them for succeeding, and a curse on them for their trickery.

I'll stick with it through to the end (I did buy it after all) and hope that the zombie thing really picks up and that it becomes more integral to the plot.

So it's the same "classic regency romance" with the addition of zombies. My only complaint: needs more zombies.

I've said before that books, reading, and the local city library are a few of the things that rate very highly in my list of hobbies. Upon returning from my New Year's holiday, I went to the library and saw that 3 books I wanted to read were available, so I got them all, thinking that I could manage to read all 3 books within the 1 month borrowing period. It'd be like a reading challenge I told myself.

I wouldn't say I'm a slow reader, but the amount of time available to me for reading is the biggest hurdle to completing such a challenge: spare weekend afternoons being the largest chunk of available time, followed by before I go to bed at night, during my lunch break at work, and maybe even a few pages when I turn-on my work computer in the morning. (When I lived in the suburbs, I could add 'the train ride to/from work' to that list, which added about 40 minutes every weekday.)

1 month on, I did manage to read those 3 books, but for as long as I've been having this love-affair with the library, I've had this nasty little habit of borrowing another book whenever I return the one I've just read. It was never a problem before as it kept me with something to read, but now it's keeping me perpetually in 'reading challenge' mode which is starting to weigh on me. So I've still got 3 books to go, none of them the ones I originally borrowed after New Year's, and on top of those I also have the 2 books I was given as Christmas presents from my family (Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan and Michael Flynn's Eifelheim).

I'm trying to break the cycle - I don't want to feel eternally obligated to use my spare time reading books when I should redirect that spare time into other things like planning for Pizza 1.1, or practicing guitar now that I have someone to practice songs with - and with the last book I returned I did manage to leave the library without a replacement. However, something else has taken the place of my library habits, which is doing just as good a job of putting a new book in my hands: curiosity.

Cats aren't the only thing curiosity can kill...
(and 10 points if you saw this image and thought 'Schrodinger's lolcat!')

Ever started at a topic in Wikipedia, and then followed the 'see also' and other links, only to find yourself hours later at a totally unrelated topic? (What, no? Well, XKCD has it documented, so I know it's not just me that does it) Well, that happened to me last week, and while I can't remember what it is I started with, I do remember ending-up on the Wikipedia entry for Moby-Dick.

I've never read Moby-Dick before. With all the cultural references to Captain Ahab and his hunt for the elusive white whale, I thought I knew enough of the essential plot points that I didn't need to read Moby-Dick. As I was reading through the article and the parts about the background, themes, and the effects the book has had on us to this very day, the curiosity in me took hold and I started wanting to read the book to get an understanding on all of this stuff and to join the bandwagon that has been rolling since it was first published over 150 years ago.

With the prospect of a slow weekend ahead, and against my better judgement (knowing that I had 2 more library books on my plate), I went to the library's online catalogue to see if a copy of Moby-Dick was available.

They had 1 left.

The opening line of the book reads:

Call me Ishmael.

Looking back through my previous posts, I'm quite surprised to see that the books I read haven't really been mentioned. There is no Books/Reading/Library category (well, there will be one after I write this up) despite books, reading, and the library being the things I carry most often, the thing I do in my spare time, and one of my favourite places to just kill time in Wellington, respectively.

(Hell, it's books that propelled me to write all the sorts of stuff I keep in the Writing section of my site, which in turn transformed the main page of this site into more of a blog than just updates of my projects like it used to be. And it's authors like Maureen Johnson who got me into Blog Every Day April. Suffice it to say, books, writers, and writing have definitely made things more interesting around here.)

Authors and their blogs do get mentioned here or there on occasion. Today's mention will be Scott Westerfeld, a science fiction author whose more popular works actually live in the young adult (YA) section of the library: the Uglies "trilogy" (4 books, with a 5th as a sort of companion of the Uglies universe to be added), and the Midnighters trilogy.

The author is also in talks for a possible movie adaptation of the series

I actually came across Scott's work when it was just stuff in the vanilla-sci-fi section of the library (The Risen Empire, and sequel The Killing of Worlds). I've been meaning to read his Uglies trilogy for a while - I even had it down as something I might buy for myself last Christmas - but only got around to it now because the popularity of the series means the books are always on loan.

I managed to get a hold of the first book in the series, Uglies, last week, and was so hooked that I used every spare moment I had to read it and finished just yesterday. When I went to return the book today, I looked-up the sequel, Pretties, in the library database to see if it was available. Just my luck - the 3rd copy of the book was available! So I made a bee line for the W authors in the YA section of the library... and couldn't find it there :|

Hmm, must be in one of those special displays or other sections that highlight good books, I thought, so I started going through the entire YA section of the library, searching for this one book.

So that's how I spent my lunch break - looking like a lost soul, travelling many times over the same ground, drawing stares from the seated readers as they watched and wondered why this grown office-working adult male is wandering around the section of the library filled with books mostly aimed at teen and pre-teen girls...

I eventually found it after referring to the library database once again; seeing that the book was just returned today, and finding it in the Recently Returned section of YA. But my discovery-of-the-day award would actually have to go to this new category of YA books that I came across.

On the same shelf as long-running YA series' with categories such as 'detective stories', 'chick lit', 'horror', and the like - each separated by a vivid appropriately-labelled yellow bookend - was a category so specific that I was surprised to find it filled with just as many books as every other category:

Exclusive academies for rich kids who form cliques

The kind of stuff you'd find in there? Gossip Girl.

(a sort-of sequel to my BEDA post, Mother's Day ahead)

Mother's Day (and my mum's birthday) was over a month ago, and what I ended-up getting my mum was a 2-part present to cover both occasions:

The first part was a book, The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger. The second part of the present will be that, provided she likes the book, I'll take her to see the movie adaptation of the film coming out later this year.

I've never read the book myself, but have been meaning to for a long time; it's just that it's always on loan whenever I visit the library. Now that there's a copy on hand, I'll be sure to borrow it from my mum when she's done reading it.

So what should I happen to see when I made my way to work last week? As I walked through the book store from which I bought the book to reach the lift I needed to take to my work, I saw an entire shelf of The Time Traveller's Wife for sale at 50% off...

F*!@$!

For 50% off at Whitcoulls at the moment

When I got the book so many weeks ago, it was the last one on the shelf! It wasn't overly expensive or anything like that, but this has happened to me so often: I buy something, only to find it at a reduced price a week or so later! Most often this happens with clothes, which sucks because I just bought this sweet new jacket for an upcoming skiing trip at full price.

If history chooses to repeat itself - which it often does just to mock me, probably because I never took it seriously as a subject during my high school years (lesson learned: don't shun your studies lest they come back and taunt you later in life, especially physics which will find very mathematical and cold-hearted ways to screw with you) - then I should see this exact jacket on sale a week or 2 before my skiing trip.

The other types of products this happens to me a lot with is computer stuff. Although with the speed at which technology evolves and the prices drop, a certain amount of "it'll be cheaper next week" is to be expected.

I guess it's the world's way of getting its money back off me; because I don't spend a lot or buy things very often, the economy finds some way to take it all back, thus evening-out my semi-frugal nature.