I’m on a wife-enforced diet but there are doughnuts in the newsroom.

The center cannot hold. It’s the melange.

Quirk Classics, the auspicious publisher of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has announced the release of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Even better, there’s a trailer on YouTube. (Props for splurging on the CG.)

I have no intention of reading it. While I do like Sea Monsters and Jane Austen, I discovered that two good things cannot always be combined into one great thing. (Unless these two things are key lime pie and cheesecake. Then, the result is fantastic.)

Moreover, I always thought of Sense and Sensibility as Pride and Prejudice’s ugly sister. If I didn’t like the hot sister zombified, I’m not going to like the wing-girl.

Sea Monsters is not going to be written by Zombies scribe, Seth Grahame-Smith. Apparently, he’s busy writing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Instead, Ben H. Winters (which sounds suspiciously like a pen name) will be taking the reins.

Now for something completely different:

Tricia loaned me her copy of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox; and it’s good, great even.

I won’t reprise Tricia’s comments, but I will add this. Maggie O’Farrell writes Esme is present tense. It’s an unusual choice, but it suits the book. It gives the narrative an immediacy it might otherwise lack and makes the shifts in perspective less jarring.

That's all I got. Have a good weekend. Live long, prosper and party all the time.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com