I consider myself a well-read, liberally educated man. Few authors have sunk so low in my esteem that I have stricken them from consideration when selecting a book to read. I like to read. I have respect for authors who have suffered the painstaking ordeal of writing a novel. In the vast majority of cases authors deserve a measure of respect for accomplishing that much. Jane Austen is not one of these authors. I know, I know. She’s amazingly popular. Her skills as a writer are transcendent. Her social commentary is sublime; her irony is dramatic, bitter and pointed — all at the same time (something Alanis Morissette was never quite capable of pulling off I’m sad to say). I don’t like Jane Austen books. I don’t. I don’t care for her writing. I don’t like Jane Austen books. So, aside from a compulsory reading assignment in school the only way you would ever entice me to pick up a Jane Austen novel would be to put zombies in it.

And sure enough, that’s exactly what Seth Grahame-Smith has done. Pride and Prejudice is part of the public domain, so Grahame-Smith took the text and intercut it with a contemporary zombie story that would make George Romero proud. The end product: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In an interview Grahame-Smith explains, “You have this fiercely independent heroine, you have this dashing heroic gentleman, you have a militia camped out for seemingly no reason whatsoever nearby, and people are always walking here and there and taking carriage rides here and there … It was just ripe for gore and senseless violence.”

It’s October. That means Halloween and spooky things. There are new horror movies to see — including at least two zombie movies: Zombieland and Survival of the Dead. So I’m going to read a Jane Austen zombie book. Yes. A zombie book!

From the back cover:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton — and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers — and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield. Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read.

Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of essays by David Sedaris. Sedaris has been a frequent contributor to Ira Glass’ Chicago Public Radio show This American Life on WBEZ. In fact several of the essays in this book were first read on This American Life. I’ve become an avid fan of Glass’ show. Most often I listen to it in podcast form. Very occasionally I will listen to it online, and once in a great while I will listen to it broadcast on the air. There’s a sort of timelessness to the show. After all, as Glass himself states, This American Life is not really a news show.

So it is out of my appreciation for This American Life that I have picked up Sedaris’ collection of mostly autobiographical essays. Reviews of the book have been almost universally laudatory. And after the bleak and powerful conclusion of Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road, I could use with a bit of a laugh.

On Wednesday, July 21st, Chuck Klosterman is joining Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune and Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club at the DePaul University bookstore for a panel discussion on the role of music in their work and their lives. I’ve read quite a few books by Chuck Klosterman over the past few years, most recently Killing Yourself to Live, where Klosterman travels the United States to visit a number of locations where rock stars have died. During that “epic” road trip, Klosterman pontificates at length about music. (This is not all that surprising given the premise to the piece he floated past his editor at the time.)

Downtown Owl, in contrast, is (mostly) fiction and not (directly) about music. — Although I could argue that all Klosterman writing is, in some way, about music and non-fiction.

Downtown Owl is the unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where rural mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing. It’s technically about certain people in a certain place at a certain time … but it’s really about a problem. And the problem is this: What does it mean to be a normal person? And there is no answer. But in Downtown Owl, what matters more is how you ask the question.

Owl, small town in rural North Dakota, is home to a wide cast of nicknamed characters: a town described as a place where disco is dead but punk never happened.

As I’m reading this, I’m looking forward to meeting Klosterman and maybe — just maybe — asking him to sign my paperback copies of his books.

Most people recognize F. Scott Fitzgerald as a novelist. I remember college professors promoting The Great Gatsby as the exemplar of “the great American novel”. And up until I discovered this collection, Jazz Age Stories, I had not given it much thought that Fitzgerald might have written short fiction as well. I was intrigued to learn that over the course of his writing career Fitzgerald made more money from the publications of his short stories than he ever did from his novels.

Jazz Age Stories is reprint of two earlier collections of short stories, originally published by Scribner’s: Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). This republication collects all of the stories in those two earlier editions. Some notable stories include “The Ice Palace,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and “Diamonds as Big as the Ritz.”

I am curious to learn whether these shorter glimpses of the Jazz Age will show me something I did not see while reading Gatsby. Fitzgerald referred to the era in which he lived as “a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” We have come to know this generation as the Lost Generation: John Steinbeck, Earnest Hemingway, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I have a strong affection for each of these authors — an affection with which my child bride does not always concur. This may be why I occasionally refer to her as Zelda.