Reading Two Books at Once? Combine Them.

'I capture the castle of Otranto' - Bloodcurdling, gothic - but tender - coming-of-age saga.

Mr The Nipper, my lawyers are onto it.

An orphan's story doesn't turn out quite as he'd expected.

Teen girl becomes drug addict, takes the trip of her life.

Australian rabbits, posing as humans, capture hitchhikers and eat them.

Three-book fantasy epic about rectal parasites.

Hip NY club kids do mounds of coke and smack, pass out, end up in dreamland where they're told the only escape is away off in Arcturus; on the way there one loses his arm and a girl's sucked into a pimp's sexsport harem.

Multiple murders in an abbey. Snow White's sister did it.

Algernon is transported to Redwall, where he's made to think up genius ideas on how to save everyone from evil cats/rats/etc.

Vermeer paints Griet as the spokesmodel for what will be the biggest marketing campaign for Diet Water in history.

1) Mason & Moby Dixon

Explorers cross the plains in search of giant mechanical white duck.

2) The Crying of Lot 40-19-84

Not only Big Brother's watching, but Tristero and Pierce might be, too.

Middlemarchsex

Tale of a 19th century provincial village of Greek hermaphrodites.

Hero of the Irish struggle for liberation gets mixed up in a different kind of struggle for liberation altogether. Hilarity ensues!

Charismatic computer hacker is committed to mental hospital. This way for laughs!

James Bond discovers that the love of his life has a terminal illness. Mind your sides!

A naive orphan girl from London who can't comprehend evil and bad motives falls for a well-meaning clerk-cum-imperialist who becomes the godhead for a tribe in the Congo. Marlowe returns home to tell her that Kurtz is dead.

Too sensitive to face combat, neurasthenic lies up in WWII military hospital. After dipping a donut in a mug of coffee, he recalls, in excruciating detail, every moment of his upbringing and basic training. Novel tops 100,000 pages.

(3 books: The chapters of P.J. O'Rourke's Eat the Rich called "Bad Capitalism," which is set in Albania, and "Good Capitalism," set on New York City's stock exchange; "Herodias," the third of Flaubert's "Trois Contes; "Colonel Sun," Kingsley Amis's Bond novel; and Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates)

Agent 007 goes to Albania to break into a pyramid full of embezzled parrot bombs. His beautiful assistant, Salome, is decapitated by Ralph Nader and comes back to life three days later as a mermaid; Bond can't get it up for a fish and while he's trying the parrots sell him to the Queen of Spanish Harlem for 30 shares of Enron stock.

George and Anne notice strange lights on deserted Kirrin Island so round up the rest of the gang and unleash a day of ferocious fire-bombing.

(Mikey, I can't believe that i spent 10 minutes trying to find a way to shoehorn 'Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn' into my post and missed that one...cheers.)

Grammatical irregularities of early eighties football magazine.

On the road to Wigan Pier
Author meets working-class people, borrows money.

and

Alice in Wonderland Avenue
Teen girl follows Lizard King through doors of perception, finds bags
labeled Inject Me and Snort Me.

Two people finally get it on after years of fannying around. Soundtrack features Lulu.

Timmy gets what's coming to him, little canine fucker.

Love story providing an incisive perspective on the lives of 19th Century English Jews. At the end, the two lovers sail off into the sunset, bound for America, where they grow old and are tragically executed for selling US nuclear secrets to the Russians.

A Suitable Butcher Boy -- Enormously long, everyone dead at the end.

To Kill a Wind-up Bird Chronicle -- Boo Radley is unjustly accused of imprisoning a made-up girl in a well because of something that happened in China or something. Valuable life lessons learned from Gregory Peck.

The Famous Five People You Meet In Heaven -- "Gosh, welcome to heaven!"
said Dick. "Woof!" said Timmy.

Sweeney climbs trees to escape trenchfoot and the horrors of war.

Overcrowded fun as Iranian ex-official buys haunted house.

Not for the dyslexic, this is the ultimate in spoon-licking chick lit.

Feck's sake.

Anna Madrigal's quiet life is thrown into disarray when Michael beats his boyfriend to death with a frozen leg of lamb and gets the police to eat the murder weapon.

Young girl begins 12 voyages of discovery of magic, alternative worlds and original sin in the company of classic menko Iain Sinclair.

Does Scarlett find a way to get Rhett back? What new joys, frustrations and adventures does the future hold? Who cares? I think I'll wait for the film starring Basil Rathbone.

Stephen Hawking takes time out from being clever to condense Robert Jordan's gargantuan fantasy sequence for people who can't be arsed reading the whole bleeding lot. 10 books and running, you've got to be having a laugh, mate.

The Player of Patriot Games
Set in a anarchist/right-wing future
where a government agent
infiltrates a mysterious game
organised by the IRA

Close Encounters Of The Third Policeman - Man is beset by strange visions of
mountains and lights in the sky. Discovers it is all, in fact, about a
bicycle.

The Plague Dogs of War
A crack team of ex-laboratory dogs is assembled to overthrow evil cat
dictator

"In Remembrance of The Thing Past" - Belle
Époque author reminisces on struggle with
shape-shifting alien.

I could go on.

Non-fiction polemic about the post-modern authors that are destroying America.

A young man daydreams about being a gay alcoholic comic genius when in fact he's just a tedious git reciting Monty Python.

The Selfish Giant Gene

A giant drives all the children out of his garden thereby ensuring the evolutionary development of children born with holes in their feet who can scam him into thinking they're Christ.

Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass Bead Game

A young girl magically travels to a strange and distant land and realises she's in way over her head.

Places in the Heart of Darkness

During the Great Depression, a plucky farm widow (played by Sally Field) hops a freight train and travels deep into the heart of the Dust Bowl -- to rescue a deranged socialist balladeer (played by Woody Guthrie) who has become head of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter. Hijinks ensue. Film climaxes with extended sequence of metaphysical philosophizing set to banjo music, followed by a tornado. Most memorable line: "You like me, you really like me -- the horror, the horror!"

yossarian sits naked in an invisible London subway; Milo buys out the faire and the chaplain goes mad trying to open a cellar to the upperworld.

Additionally, there was a mention for Bookslut and for Jessa's blog about airline reading.

Incidentally, I once knew a guy who wrote a new chapter to the bible. In binary. You shouldn't laugh at the mentally ill, but the bible! In binary!

English schoolmarm sent to educate disinherited son of Saxon nobleman.

Saddam's Nobel speech found

By Sam E. Colon

As news of Saddam Hussein's capture in Iraq electrified the airwaves last December, an equally dramatic story was secretly unfolding in Europe.

It has just been revealed by S & M News Service that, some weeks before the Iraqi leader was apprehended, a box containing some of Hussein's private papers was discovered in a cave near Baghdad by a Bedouin shepherd boy - who handed them over to US authorities. The writings were then flown in secrecy to an undisclosed European location, where they were turned over to handwriting experts and linguistic scholars.

For reasons of national security, American officials have kept the literary experts’ findings secret - until now. In a statement issued earlier today, the academics concluded that, among the papers, was a genuine final draft of a speech Hussein planned to deliver. They noted, with shocked awe, that the former dictator was actually convinced that he would be winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and that the draft in question was actually Hussein's acceptance speech to the Nobel committee.

The translated text in full:

"Well, the old men 'round here, sometimes they get on bad terms with the
younger men. Old, young - age don't carry weight; it doesn't matter in the
end. Things come alive or they fall flat. Not always easy kicking someone
out; got to wait awhile, it can be an unpleasant task. Sometimes somebody
wants you to give something up -- and, tears or not, it's too much to ask.
I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound. I've seen enough heartache
and strife. I'm like some feudal lord, got more lives than a cat. I'm
decorated, I'm well-schooled and I'm skilled. I'm not sentimental, it don't
bother me at all how many of my pals have been killed. Some things are too
terrible to be true. I won't come here no more if it bothers you. I’m
leaving in the morning, just as soon as the dark clouds lift. Gonna break in
the roof, set fire to the place as a parting gift. Why don't you just shove
off if it bothers you so much?"

In addition to this extraordinary document, the scholars also found
several unsent, notably torrid love letters to Britney Spears and Margaret Thatcher in Hussein’s handwriting, signed ‘Pookie.’

Clearly, the academics stated, the Nobel speech was lifted almost verbatim from several scenes of Bob Dylan's recent box office smash, Masked & Anonymous.

Dylan was reached at Junichi Saga's new mansion on Mount Fuji - where he and the Japanese writer are collaborating on a new cookbook, to be marketed with the upcoming Victoria's Secret 'Drunk Dominatrix Conquers Terrorism' ad campaign.

The legendary singer, songwriter, bon vivant, thespian and recently fired spokesman for a generation said of Hussein: "What good is he anyway, if he can’t stand up to some old businessman?"

-30-

Pride and Moby Dick
--A feminist discourse on Ahab's reluctance to admit size does matter.

The Mayor of Lolita
--A man's struggle to bring chastity to a city of nymphettes.

The Secret Garden History
--A group of students visit Greece where one of them falls in love with a crippled plant. Mad gardener vows revenge.

Harry Potter and the English Opium Eater
--Lord V's latest attempt to infiltrate Hogwarts.

bye

John Steinbeck and Steven King:
Doc collects specimens on Cannery Row. . . but they won't stay dead!

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sesame Street:
The scarlet letter A, the scarlet letter B, the scarlet letter C...

Aesop and Lenin:
Comrade Rabbit begs his Commissar not to throw him into dat ol' capitalist briar patch.

Raymond Chandler and the Oxford English Dictionary:
Marlowe learns what it means to be a shamus.

Shakespeare and Beethoven:
"To to to beeeee . . .
Or not to to to beeeeee . . .

Edgar A. Poe and Hunter S. Thompson:
The Cask of Amontillado, a quart of Wild Turkey, a handful of reds, a couple of 'Ludes . . .

Dickens, Melville, and the Canadian Supreme Court:
Scrooge is found impaled on a crutch; police withhold the name of the tiny Young Offender.

Mickey Spillane and Dr. Seuss:
Drop the gat,
Cat,
Or you'll
Eat
That
Hat.

- courtesy J. Cates, from the Vancouver Sun

A History Of The World In 9 1/2 Weeks
Series of interconnected love stories about people who have lots of graphic sex on Noah's Ark.

I Am David Copperfield
Thinly-disguised author character escapes from Eastern European prison camp before moving in with eccentric aunt in Kent.

A hard-boiled detective story with impromptu tests and summaries.

Anthony Bourdain, newest member of the Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts, reveals new statistical analyses of player performance based on what the players eat and drink during the season. In an analytic coup that will be discussed for years, Bourdain reveals that every perfect game ever pitched was preceded by the winning pitcher dining on bull testicles. (Other BP anlysts dissent in an accompanying essay, decrying the "small sample size.")

Ha, this happened to me when one of the second string songwriters in Ken Emerson's Always Magic In The Air: The Bomp And Brilliance Of The Brill Building Era had practically the same name as the (other kind of) hit man protagonist of Lawrence Block's Hit Man, Hit List and Hit Parade- Jack and John Keller.

A Good Huck is Hard to Finn

Atlas please be quiet please

Titans of American Industry protest at the lack of communication between them, the smallness of their lives and the pathos and beauty that lie at the core of the smallest moments.

by Raymond Rand

Now that I would read.

Portnoy's Complaint: The Hunter

After Portnoy is betrayed by his girlfriend on a heist gone bad, he returns to New York on a mission of revenge. He won't stop until he gets to the top of the organization: his mother.

Texas Tower shooter Charles Whitman showed up in two books I just finished, in Christopher Priest's The Extremes for obvious reasons and in Mordecai Richler's Cocksure as part of the black comedy. Can't really come up with synopsis of the combined book though. Both had too much going on already by themselves.

Around the World in 120 Days of Sodom - On a wager from the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg and his trusty manservant Passepartout set out on a transcontinental journey of drunken loutishness and debauched sexual tortures. Somewhere in French Indochina, they get held up for a bit.

The Fortress of Cecil Beaton's Solitude - Erudite socalite and photographer to the stars/royalty finds himself desparing of Greta Garbo's attitude and fading allure whilst making a treacherous journey across Brooklyn to buy a copy of Giant Size X-Men #1

Ha.

say, how was that Christopher Priest book?

Pretty good. Now I'm about to start The Glamour.

So far I've only read one of his besides The Extremes, Inverted World, which was amazing. In both of these he creates a world and then keeps slowly adding weird little details. At the end he somehow manages to come up with some kind of an explanation of what is going on but not spoil the mystery, eating his cake and having it. I guess these endings might infuriate some people who would want it all tied up with a bow, but to me they were right on.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest in The Ice Palace

A girl steals a billion dollars after her new friend goes missing, just before the winter snows arrive. An aunt is killed by a biker gang. An iBook is also involved.