I listened to J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun. It had been on my list of things to read for so long, and I certainly think it's earned all the praise. It was hard to listen to parts of it, and I guess he had some kind of imagery going with the flies because he spared no opportunity to tell us about where flies landed, what they ate...and ate. I started to even hear the buzzing.Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith was just brilliant. I was a little disappointed to read the history of it -- seems like someone went looking for a copyright-free book to add zombies to -- my impression is that it didn't arise from a mutual love of the material. Here's what Wikipedia said:
Quirk Books editor Jason Rekulak developed the idea for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies after comparing a list of "popular fanboy characters like ninjas, pirates, zombies and monkeys" with a list of public domain book titles such as War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and Wuthering Heights.[4][5] He turned the project over to writer Seth Grahame-Smith.
EW called it a literary mash-up. About 70% of the book is original Austen.
The first line is: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains will be in want of more brains.”
I certainly know nothing of the zombie literature, but I do believe that putting it together with Pride and Prejudice created something that is much more than the sum of its parts.
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