Jane Austen's Monster Mash-Ups

First there was the mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now Quirk Books proudly introduce Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters written by Ben H. Winters, which grafts together classic novel and horror story.

The new novel, say the publishers, will find the Dashwood sisters tossed from their home and sent to an island of man-eating sea creatures. More about it on The New York Times' blog, and enjoy the trailer below :



Other fun mashup titles suggested by readers :

• A Farewell to Arms and Legs
• The Corpse of Monte Cristo
• As I Lay Bleeding
• Android Karenina
• Portrait of a Werewolf as a Young Man
  
• The Brothers Karazombie
• Uncle Tom’s Coffin
• I Know Why the Caged Zombie Sings
• Tender is the Night of the Living Dead
• Lady Chatterley’s Braaaaaains

Any more to add??

Why does Jane Austen have such enduring appeal?

Claire Harman has just published Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, reviewed here by John Sutherland.

Asked for her take on the monster mash-ups of Austen's works, Harman replies in The Australian that :

There is a kind of violent desire to go in there and to mess things up a bit.

Don't Read These Books!

I've tossed you plenty of lists of must read books. Now how about a list of classics you needn't waste your time with?

In an attempt to save readers valuable reading time when there is so much great stuff out there, The Second Pass lists ten books :

... that will be pressed into your hands by ardent fans. ... Resist them!

is the advice. The books not to read are :

• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• The USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos
• Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Any list of books is there to be argued with. I'm very glad I've read The Rainbow, The Corrections and A Tale of Two Cities. The Road for all it's faults is a great book. But I reckon (shhhh!) that the writers are right about One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I've read twice without enjoying it.

Others on the list I haven't read, but now I'm curious.

What would you argue with? (You are invited to post your comments here.) What would you like to see join the list?

100 Novels Everyone Should Read ... But Sez Who??

The Telegraph has a list of 100 novels 'everyone should read'. Who chose the titles and how the list was compiled is anyone's guess. I think it's supposed to be ranked so the No 1 title is the most important.

But anyway, when I see a list of books I have to play the game :

100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein

99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon

95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki

90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac

86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal

84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

83 Germinal by Emile Zola

82 The Stranger by Albert Camus

81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

76 The Trial by Franz Kafka

75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan

73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque

72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin

70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

68 Crash by JG Ballard

67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul

66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

59 London Fields by Martin Amis

58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald

54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

51 Underworld by Don DeLillo

50 Beloved by Toni Morrison

49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

47 The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet

44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

43 The Rabbit books by John Updike

42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope

36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson

32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky

30 Atonement by Ian McEwan

29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec

28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

24 Ulysses by James Joyce

23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

22 A Passage to India by EM Forster

21 1984 by George Orwell

20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse

14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee

7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

1 Middlemarch by George Eliot

Total 47%

Those I've read are in bold. Many of these I've read more than once, some several times.

Some of the ones I haven't read I don't feel guilty about because I've read others by the same author, some I've started but not finished, some I know from films or TV versions. Others I feel terribly guilty about ... especially the ones nagging at me from my bookshelves.