Congratulations to Angela Wilpula, who won a copy of "Jane Austen's World: The Life and Times of England's Most Popular Author" in our #nh140 contest.

#nh140 Tell us why YOU should have been Mrs. Darcy twitter.com/nhcheryl/statu…
— Cheryl Sadler, MLIS (@nhcheryl) June 3, 2013

What is Lizzie Bennet to me? It's like asking what are men to rocks and mountains! #nh140 #janeausten #pandp #200yrs #I♡Darcy
— Angela Wilpula (@AWilpula) June 6, 2013

Congratulations, @awilpula! You've won our #nh140 contest and will receive "Jane Austen's World"yfrog.com/ocv2zlvj
— Cheryl Sadler, MLIS (@nhcheryl) June 11, 2013

@nhcheryl yay! I'm more excited than Kitty and Lydia at a military ball with filled up dance cards!
— Angela Wilpula (@AWilpula) June 12, 2013

Keep reading News-Herald.com and follow @newsheraldinoh on Twitter to stay informed on our next #nh140 event.

Are you a fan of "Pride and Prejudice"? Should you have been Mrs. Darcy? Then tell us in 140 characters why Lizzie Bennet has nothing on you.

Tweet using the hashtag #nh140 by 5 p.m. June 11, when we'll pick our favorite love note. The winner will receive a copy of "Jane Austen's World: The Life and Times of England's Most Popular Author."

Remember to follow @newsheraldinoh on Twitter.

We here at The News-Herald are not the only ones celebrating Jane Austen this month. (We're giving away the book "Jane Austen's World" next week. For more details on how you could win, check out our blog post #nh140: Win "Jane Austen's World" by telling us why YOU should have been Mrs. Darcy.)

Mentor Public Library has planned a few events framed around the author. The first one took place over the weekend, but you still have two opportunities to head to the library to talk about Jane Austen and learn about modern adaptations of her work. Head over to Lifelong Learning At Mentor Public Library: Jane Still Reigns to read more about what's coming up.

Are you a fan of "Pride and Prejudice"? Should you have been Mrs. Darcy? Then tell us in 140 characters why Lizzie Bennet has nothing on you.

Tweet using the hashtag #nh140 by 5 p.m. June 11, when we'll pick our favorite love note. The winner will receive a copy of "Jane Austen's World: The Life and Times of England's Most Popular Author."

Remember to follow @newsheraldinoh on Twitter.

1. If you watched Mad Men this season, then you know Roger Sterling wrote his memoirs.

It turns out these memoirs are real (even if the person who wrote them isn’t) and will be published by Grove/Atlantic.

How does one qualify this? Memoir? Novel? Cash in?

Regardless, Sterling’s Gold does not top the meta-memoir trilogy penned by Barney Stinson: The Playbook; Bro on the Go; and The Bro Code.

Those were legend — wait for it —

2. Professor Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford University said that some of Jane Austen’s trademark pristine prose may be from the hand of her editor. Sutherland studied more than 1,100 handwritten documents from Austen and concluded that she had “a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing” and “the polished punctuation and epigrammatic style we see in Emma and Persuasion is simply not there.”

Sutherland attributes the style difference to editor William Gifford, who worked with Austen’s publisher.

Then again, sometimes, things look different on the second or third draft. And I’m not sure it’s that big of a deal that Austen had an editor. Who doesn’t?

3. Speaking of Austen, Salon speculated on how classic literary characters would react to current technology. They concluded that Emma would love her some Facebook.

Can anyone doubt that if Holden Caulfield were around today he’d have a blog? He practically invented the blog, five decades before the things existed! As for James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus: He’d have a Tumblr.

4. Danny Devito will voice the Lorax in a movie based on Dr. Seuss’s book.

It will also star Zac Efron, Betty White and Ed Helms as the Once-Ler. No word on who will play the Swany Swans.

5. dary.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

1. Joey Comeau analyzes five books you never want to see listed as a favorite on someone’s dating site.

His choices imply a libertine balance. He thinks anything by Ayn Rand and the Bible are red flags. (I couldn’t get through Atlas Shrugged with a thirty-aught-six, but the Bible has some lovely literature in it. Regardless of religion, I think everyone should read Ecclesiastes.)

He rightfully warns people of The Notebook. Comeau’s take: This is either the kind of (expletive deleted) guy who puts Nicholas Sparks on his profile to seem sensitive, or the kind of (expletive deleted) girl who falls for it.

I’d be nervous about anyone who likes Sweet Valley High or Kerouac. Also, it’s cool like to comics. (No, it is. Samuel L. Jackson said so at Comicon.) But I wouldn’t categorize “anything Batman” as one of my favorites.

2. Mental_floss lists seven things you might not know about Dr. Seuss.

Favorite fact: Seuss worked the word “contraceptive” into the original text of Hop on Pop to make sure his editor read it.

3. Apparently, people hate The Giving Tree.

What a shock. People don’t understand the concept of altruism.

4. Apparently, it’s Roald Dahl day or month or something. In honor of that, Philip Ardagh lists his ten favorite Dahl books. (My favorite, BFG, barely made the list.)

5. Speaking of Jane Austen (we’re always speaking of Jane Austen,) the Austen Fiction Manuscripts Project allows us to read Austen’s handwritten manuscripts. The site doesn't have her best known stuff (Emma, Pride and Prejudice) uploaded but it does have Persuasion.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Just bullet points today:

1. Marmaduke and Franz Kafka?



Why not? It’s the Internet, after all — the wonderland where Kanye West’s tweets and cartoons from The New Yorker can be juxtaposed.

The best thing about Keith Wilson’s Kafka and canine combination is that he has carefully matched the quote with the image. I’m amused by The Nietzsche Family Circus, also, but it only smashes together random Nietzsche quotes and Family Circus drawings. Yes, it’s good for a chuckle; but it is a coincidence if the final product reveals something new about Nietzsche or the Keane family.



2. Speaking of Kafka, lawyers have just opened four safety deposit boxes that are thought to be filled with unread Kafka manuscripts.

You may recall that Kafka instructed his friend, Max Brod, to burn all of his unfinished work when he died. If Brod had listened, nobody would have read The Trial, The Castle or Amerika.

This Guardian article details all the recent legal wrangling regarding Kafka’s still unread writings.

3. Jimmy Chen of HTMLGiant is so tired of birds on book covers.

4. Editor Janice Harayda tweeted the five most overused insults in book reviews.

They are “cardboard characters,” “thin plot,” “cookie-cutter characters,” “the book falls apart at the end,” and “I just didn’t care about the characters.”

Harayda’s not wrong, but she’d be better off just posting a link to Michelle Kerns’s monthly Reviewerspeak Awards.

5. Finally, Susan Miller of Salon asks why there can’t be more to these Jane Austen mash-ups than dropping some stock horror element in Hertfordshire.

“We couldn’t help noticing that the vast majority of the Austen mash-ups involve injecting some action element from contemporary pop culture into Austen’s stories in order to make the novels more interesting. This seems to work for quite a few readers, but those of us who find Austen’s books sufficiently interesting on their own are left to wonder when the favor will be returned. We’ve been shown what zombies and monsters and bare-knuckle brawlers can do for Jane — when do we get to see what Jane can do for them?” Miller asks.

Miller is asking, more eloquently, the same question I did when I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Why not use the zombies for something more than comedy? Why not make them a metaphor for socially solvent but intellectually bankrupt socialites?

However, I suspect it’s too late for this craze to beget anything more useful than a laugh. If nothing else, it probably coaxed some people into reading Jane Austen who might not have.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Picoult, eh?

I like Jodi Picoult but...

High schoolers should read modern authors but...

You know what? Never mind. No “buts.” If students don’t read Picoult specifically, they should read someone like Picoult.

There are plenty of current authors who deserve study and discussion, and they would interest the students more than Crime and Punishment.

So while I might not include Picoult in my trio of books high schoolers should read before they graduate, I like the logic that lead you to include her.

My list offers no surprises:

1. Catcher in the Rye — I was not in the legion of students who considered Catcher their favorite book. (I think most of them like it because it’s the first book they’ll read with a specific curse in it.) I found Holden’s ranting tiresome instead of insightful, but I’d be foolish to deny the connection this book has with teenagers. I never related to Holden, but Catcher is still a rite of passage.

2. Macbeth — High school students should read Shakespeare before they graduate. The only problem is time has rendered Shakespearean prose ponderous. Fortunately, Macbeth has enough sex and violence to keep the groundlings engaged. It also helps that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest play. It’s not Shakespeare’s best work (that’d probably be Hamlet) or even my favorite (either As You Like It or Taming of the Shrew;) but it is the play high schoolers are most likely to enjoy.

3. Pride and Prejudice — I wanted to include a translated title like One Hundred Years of Solitude or African staple Things Fall Apart. Y’know, something to let the kids know that non-English-speaking countries can write, also. I considered including a Thomas Hardy book just because he’s my favorite writer, but neither of those ideas work. I would have been bored by One Hundred Years of Solitude if I read it in high school, and Hardy’s themes are not universal enough to resonate with everyone. But Pride and Prejudice — it’s essentially the best book about dating ever. I don’t know if all the guys in the classroom would relate, but they should still have to read it.

On an unrelated note, Electric Literature is having a writing contest on its Twitter page. The best tweet with the #stuffmymusesays hashtag will win a Sony eReader. The contest lasts until Friday and will be judged by Colson Whitehead.

Some early entries —

@AndreaSeigel: Take off your pants. The ideas can’t get in.

@Vanessa_LW: It could be strep. It could also be leprosy. The internet makes self-diagnosis easy.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

Thus begins Jane Austen’s finest work on love, prejudice and the undead. “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is co-written by Seth Grahame-Smith, who, to my understanding, rewrote an unfinished manuscript that Austen had tentatively titled “Pride and Prejudice.”

The good news: “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is everything it promises to be. It’s “Pride and Prejudice” with a superfluous zombie subplot. The bad news: This isn’t as much fun as it sounds.

Grahame-Smith changes almost none of Austen’s plot or her characters. He just adds a few fight scenes between the Bennett sisters, Darcy and the undead that plague Britain.

Sure, it’s funny the first time zombies interrupt a formal ball in search of succulent brains. The juxtaposition of ravenous zombies and uptight British folk is the type of stuff Monty Python fans love.

Unfortunately, the joke runs out quicker than the page count.

Grahame-Smith apparently has nothing more in mind than adding the occasional zombie fight. It doesn’t dovetail with the plot in any significant way. If anything, it’s a persistent distraction. If I were an editor who had never read “Pride and Prejudice,” I’d tell Grahame-Smith, “Great story, but cut the zombie crap.”

Grahame-Smith has missed a golden opportunity here. (His title alone is brilliant.) There are, at least, two ways he could have made this a cult classic. He could’ve committed to the inherent zaniness of zombies invading Longbourne; or he could have used the conceit to comment on the similarities between upper-class snobs and zombies.

Grahame-Smith’s primary problem is he’s too precious with the source material. All of the new, zombie-fied prose is immaterial because he refuses to change anything of importance from “Pride and Prejudice.”

Sure, we get a few amusing moments where Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Darcy and Lady Catherine de Bourgh stop verbally sparring and make with the fisticuffs. There’s also one brilliant scene where Grahame-Smith commits to his crazy idea:

The Bennet sisters and their cousin, Mr. Collins, are accosted by the undead. Unable to fight the entire horde one at a time, Elizabeth sets the lot on fire. Jane mercifully points her musket at one, hoping to put it out of its misery; but Lizzy stops her.

“Let them burn,” Elizabeth says. “Let them have a taste of eternity.”

“Zombies” would have benefited from more of this sort of sacrilege.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Grahame-Smith saves all of his funniest stuff for the Reader’s Discussion Guide at the end. Some sample questions:

1. Many critics have addressed the dual nature of Elizabeth’s personality. On one hand, she can be a savage, remorseless killer, as we see in her vanquishing of Lady Catherine’s ninjas. On the other hand, she can be tender and merciful, as in her relationships with Jane, Charlotte, and the young bucks that roam her family’s estate. In your opinion, which of these “halves” best represent the real Elizabeth at the beginning—and the end of the novel?

3. The strange plague has been the scourge of England for “five-and-fifty years.” Why do the English stay and fight, rather than retreat to the safety of eastern Europe or Africa?

7. Does Mrs. Bennett have a single redeeming quality?

People sometimes mistake me for well read. This happens for two reasons.

Reason one: I’m a prolific quoter. If you tell me you just boxed a rhinoceros on pay-per-view, I’ll reply with an appropriate Oscar Wilde quote. This doesn’t mean I’ve read everything the man wrote. It just means I have an epithet for most moments. (My quotes also allow me to sound clever without being original.)

Reason two: I often bluff and pretend I’m better read than I am. (You’ve done it too, so stop judging. I’d guess 99.85 percent of you never read a Marcel Proust book; and, if you are one of the .15, then everyone you’ve ever discussed Proust with has been bluffing. The only exception is if you and your companion are English professors.)

Regardless, people sometimes ask me to recommend books because I am fake well read. More often than not, people ask me to suggest something funny.

I never have a good reply for a couple reasons. Reason one: Funny is malleable. What amuses me may have no affect on you. For example, I don’t find Seinfeld funny. If I wanted to hear a group of neurotic people talk about life’s inanities, I’d spend more time at work. (I say that with affection.)

Reason two: Literary humor is very different than most modern humor. If you ask me, I’ve never read a book funnier than “Pride and Prejudice.” Of course, I didn’t realize that until I read it for the third time.

But I don’t think people are looking for “Pride and Prejudice” when they ask for something funny.

However, I now have a proper response, thanks to my sister, Erin, who gave me “Stuff White People Like” by Christian Lander for my birthday.

“Stuff White People Like” — brought to you by the same people who operate the identically named Web site — catalogues, well, stuff white people like. (Apparently, making fun of white people is also something white people like.)

It takes a keen eye to notice “white people love ethnic diversity, but only as it relates to restaurants” or “white people love Wes Anderson movies more than they love their kids.”

Sure, he misses the mark a few times. (I’m pretty sure other racial populations also enjoy coffee, graduate school and Asian women.) But even when he’s wrong, he’s funny.

And I don’t need to worry about recommending this to someone one who won’t find it funny. Here’s an easy litmus test. Go to stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. If you don’t find it funny, don’t buy the book. If you laugh so hard your coworkers think you’re finally having that meltdown, get a copy.

-- Jason Lea

As a bonus, here are some blog titles I suggested that my superiors rejected: Central Booking; Writers Block; and The Blogs of War.