Friday, August 13, 2010

(Round Up) Days of Summer

It's that time again, for the weekly round-up with Laura from Combreviations (and don't forget—guest posts next week!):

Hello, friends and foes. This week I'm going to ease you into the funniest and most nauseating thing I've seen in a while. So hang in there and hold on to your lunch.

You know what's charming and not nauseating? A new book on Roald Dahl contains a missing chapter from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Sweet! (Ha.) And hey, here are 11 fictional characters in real life—I'm glad someone found Waldo. Now if only I knew the right book to be reading in public so Waldo would ask me out. Maybe I could read the new Jonathan Franzen—he's on the cover of Time, you know. And Mark Twain is always a good fallback, because there really is something to reading him today. Maybe I'll check out some of these overrated contemporary authors, or pretend these book suggestions for Obama are for me, the other President of the United States.

What are some more feel good things from the week? Well, this slightly misguided book trailer is great, and I want about six of these text posters. There's a new Chicago Manual for the Internet age, which made me sqee a little inside. And I love these better book titles, but then, I love anything that makes me feel smug and erudite. Here are some famous literary last words (hey, at least go out with a bang, amirite?), and the descendants of Dickens and Tolkien are writing together, which should be super interesting and potentially terrible.

And don't forget to check out this repackage of the Twilight books, changing the covers from black to white, so everyone who already has all four will go out and buy them again. Suckers. Is everyone feeling good and smug? Proud of ourselves? Then maybe you won't want to click through to the piece de resistance, the best and worst link in the world: erotic GOP fanfiction, starring Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Hilarious! But also, I would like to scrub my eyes clean. Ech.

Happy emotionally scarring day, reader types, and see you next week here or all week at Combreviations.

5 comments:

  1. I am fearful of the Tolkien/Dickens collaboration, to be quite honest. Here's hoping I'm pleasantly surprised when the time comes.

    As for the Twilight repackaging, it's certainly not my cup of tea, but I have no doubt that marketing scheme will net the publishers another bajillion dollars.

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  2. Thank you for all the fabulous linkage, Eric.

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  3. Hey, how about some left wing erotica? Like maybe Nancy Pelosi with John Kerry. Or Maxine Waters on Barney Frank.

    Oh. So. Hot.

    O_o

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  4. Whoa. White covers for the Twilight Series??? I never expected such a thing to even occur. I hope they sell, and I hope that they don't have a terrible shelf life being there all alone... unwanted....

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  5. White special Christmas edition books?

    "WHY???!!!" she screams as tears flood her eyes dramatically.

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