I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. I've never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I'm wary of happiness.

-Hugh Laurie

The world is rapidly shrinking.  As more satellites are launched and civilization continues to spread about the globe, it's getting harder to find any true mysteries left unsolved.  The age of exploration and adventure seems dead and forgotten.  Or is it?

In Benjamin Parzybok's debut novel, Couch, three twenty-somethings embark on an epic quest that takes them from their apartment in Portland, OR to the furthest reaches of myth and human experience.  Along the way they meet attractive journalists, steampunk enthusiasts, nefarious collectors, helpful councils, drunken guerillas and many others.  For it seems like the couch has a destination in mind, somewhere that it wants to go, and it's up to the three roommates to ensure it arrives there.

What makes the book interesting isn't it's seemingly unique premise - though the idea of an act of furniture moving expanding into an epic quest of identity is certainly intriguing.  What makes the readers follow along in the story are the three main characters - Thom, Tree and Eric - each with something off about them, and each with a carefully formed personality that intensifies and/or undergoes some changes in the course of the journey.

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Today's word of the day is Analogous:

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Analagous

Adjective

Similar or alike in such a way as to permit the drawing of an analogy.

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever. Because this is just a ride." And we...kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok? But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, not work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

-Bill Hicks

Song: "A Quick One While He's Away" by The Who

Event: The movie, Rushmore

There's not too many filmmakers out there that can make a scene so iconic that every time you see or hear anything associated with that scene, their film is the first thing that comes to mind.  Scorsese and Tarantino have both proven their effectiveness with marrying pop music to intense scenes so whenever you end up on classic radio and hear "Gimme Shelter" or "Stuck in the Middle" suddenly come on, that scene replays in your mind.  (Although, Mr. Scorsese - please, no more with the "Gimme Shelter."  We get it.  I assure you - we get it)

Wes Anderson is, I suppose, the less violent and more hipster friendly version of this type of filmmaker.  He's been able to marry numbers of great pop songs to beautifully staged and filmed scenes.  Like Tarantino, he seems more interested in the music that stands just on the outside of the popular mainstream - focusing more on the songs in middle of the top ten than the first 3.

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Today's word of the day is Lubitorium:

Lubitorium

A service station

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

-Franz Kafka

Today's Word of the Day is Deliciate:

Deliciate

De*li"ci*ate\, v. t. To delight one's self; to indulge in feasting; to revel. [Obs.]

Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

- Stephen Colbert

Today's word of the day is Snollygoster:

Snollygoster

n.   Slang
One, especially a politician, who is guided by personal advantage rather than by consistent, respectable principles.

...why did we wait for any thing?--why not seize the pleasure at once?--How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!

- Emma by Jane Austen

Jane Austen inspires two very different reactions within me. 

While I'm reading her books, I find them tedious and rather obnoxious.  Spending so much time in the minutiae and social mores of the upper class of an uptight society - whilst the rest of the country experienced terrible problems with the rise of the industrial revolution - it's a bit reminiscent of the popular, pretty girl in high school bitching about how she can be alone...even in a crowd (which may be why I still hate Clueless - itself based on Austen's Emma).

And yet - as with most things in this life, a good teacher can make all the difference.  For I found, under the genius tutelage of the beautiful & brilliant Professor Priscilla Gilman, that there were multiple levels to Austen's work.  Metaphors, figurative language and whole characters created as a means of commenting on the very society and cultural norms I found so detestable.

Reading Austen was tedious and arduous to me - but thinking about her work was exciting and revelatory.  Enter Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, which isn't a complete 180 on my previous experience with Austen, but was very close to it.

PPZ:DOD (for brevity sake) is the prequel to Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, although this book is written by Steve Hockensmith, not Grahame-Smith.  And while the previous entry in the series was a reworking and interweaving of Austen's text with Grahame-Smith's own injection of zombie action, this tale isn't fettered by Austen's plots, allowing Hockensmith to become much more creative.

Sometimes such freedom can be dangerous, if not outright dreadful (some pun intended).  Without the structure provided by Austen's work, it would be easy to see how PPZ:DOD could go off the rails.  However, Hockensmith has crafted a fun tale with plenty of (nerdy) genre shout-outs and perhaps even a certain level of profundity, though not at the expense of his entertaining book.  If Grahame-Smith's Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a novel entry that helps redefine a genre while constantly providing some sort of metaphor, then consider PPZ:DOD more like Shaun of the Dead - highly entertaining and amusing revisionist romp, with plenty of geeky allusions and meta-textual moments, and perhaps a slight dipping of its toe into social commentary.  Heck, there's even discussion in PPZ:DOD about using "the zed word."

More review after the jump, along with a chance to win FABULOUS prizes!

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Today's word of the day is Laetificant:

Laetificant

pertaining to a medicine that makes one feel happy or stimulated

Thom tried to think of someone who had saved the world and felt suddenly the world was short of world-saving heroes.  Perhaps saving the world was impossible unless you were the fellow who refused to press the big red button when the time came.  There were millions of heroes, each saving a very small part of the world.

- Couch by Benjamin Parzybok