Apple sold 300,000 iPads in 15 hours.

If the Pope were selling absolutions at half the cost of the e-reader (between $500 and $700, depending on how much memory you want), it might cause less of a sensation.

Those numbers are huge, bigger than expected. To give a bit of context, experts estimate that Amazon sold about 700,000 Kindles in the last two years. (We can only estimate because Amazon will not release how many it sold.) The iPad will probably match that by the end of the year.

The Kindle isn’t doomed, per se. The iPad still has some kinks (no Flash.) But it’s safe to Amazon’s hegemony has ended.

I am not one of the 300,000 people who bought an iPad Saturday, so a linked review will have to suffice.

In related news, Anna Quindlen is optimistic about reading’s backlit future. She also makes a call for the snobbing to cease amongst techies and literati.

There is and has always been more than a whiff of snobbery about lamentations that reading is doomed to extinction. That’s because they’re really judgments on human nature. If you’ve convinced yourself that America is a deeply anti-intellectual country, it must follow that we don’t read, or we read the wrong things, or we read them in the wrong fashion. And now we have gleeful e-elitism as well, the notion that the conventional product, printed and bound, is a hopeless dinosaur. Tech snobbery is every bit as silly as the literary variety. Both ignore the tremendous power of book love.

If I could, I would rename this blog The Tremendous Power of Book Love.

Moving on — Channel 4 will be tweeting Romeo and Juliet. It’s been done. Tweeting a classic is no longer the revolution it was 10 months ago.

Finally, I offer a pair of disappointing examples of censorship. Both books — The Shepherd’s Granddaughter by Anne Laurel Carter and Number the Stars by Lois Lowry — talk about the persecution of a minority. In Carter’s book, it is Palestinians; in Lowry’s, it is Jews.

The antagonistic history of the Palestinians and Jews aside, both populations have suffered. They both have been the victims of stereotypes and prejudice.

Censoring does not stop prejudice. You know what does? The Tremendous Power of Book Love.

The best way to combat bigotry is to learn about the other people. The best way to learn about them is to hear their stories. Denying children access to these stories solves nothing.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Mentor’s Reader has returned from her hiatus. What could bring her back? One hint: Zombies...

I want to apologize to both of my readers for my unscheduled hiatus. (You may cease your weeping and gnashing of teeth.) Sometimes, work gets in the way of writing about Langston Hughes and The Onion headlines.

(What? I haven’t written 'bout Onion headlines yet? I need to fix that.)

But I’m back and writing about a topic I’ve beaten to death — zombies.
(OK, technically I’ve beaten the topic to undeath. No more parentheses — back to work.)

After my 9-part dissection of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, most of my two readers assumed I was a zombies fan. They would ask me how I felt about zombie flicks. (I love Evil Dead II. I haven’t seen any others.) They’d also suggest other zombie books, including World War Z.

Loaned to me by our intern, Erich Hiner, World War Z reads more like a war memoir than a zombie romp. That’s the best part of Z. It takes itself completely seriously.

The author, Max Brooks, researched the militaries, governments and even the topography of several countries around the world and has written what he considers a likely outcome should the living dead attack.

He writes about Chinese suppression, media distortion, American overconfidence and Russian decimation. It’s clever and seems plausible — y’know, as plausible as anything involving zombies.

The only problem is Brooks does not give you any characters with whom to identify. He chooses to tell the story from a macro-perspective, interviewing survivors from all around the world. He, then, strings their vignettes together.

The jaded American, the Russian loyalist, the Chinese doctor, the profiteer who made a fortune on a zombie “vaccine” — all of them are individually interesting, but none of them are gripping. Consequently, my interest waxed and waned with each section.

My favorite character was Tomonaga Ijiro, a Japanese man who was blinded by an atomic bomb. During the war, he lived Spartanly in a forest and trained followers on the most efficient way to dispatch a zombie. Meanwhile, the country abandons Ijiro by evacuating the islands.

Ijiro’s story garners sympathy and respect. Few of the protagonists inspired an emotional response. I liked the book, but I never cared about the book.

So if you’re a zombie fan — and apparently some of the two of you are — Z is worth a read. If you’re fascinated by the art of war and don’t mind dabbling in the ridiculous, you’ll love it.

If you’re wondering when I’ll stop writing about zombies, the answer is “now.”

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. For Harold, I put now in quotation marks because I considered it a quote. As per the following dialogue:

Q. Jason, when will you stop writing about zombies?

A. Now.

The quotes were probably unnecessary. Maybe it would have been better to italicize.

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

“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?

We postpone Poetry Thursday for a deserving cause… ZOMBIES!

I hate to give my city editor, John Bertosa, credit for anything. As my boss, he is my natural enemy. He once let me borrow his car and I thanked him by denting one of his rims. I’ve shaken him down for lunch money like the third-grade dork I suspect he once was.

Not only would I kick him when he is down, but I’d change into steel-toed boots first.

The reason I can write this here without fear of consequence? Because I’m certain he would never read a literature blog.

But even I have to admit when Bertosa does something awesome, as he did this Wednesday.

I was busy working on something — honestly, I can’t remember what. It must have been important — when he dropped a book on my desk.

Not a book. The book.

That’s right. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

It’s exactly as I would have hoped: a straightforward retelling of Pride and Prejudice with a shoehorned zombie subplot.

I’ve only read the first 60 pages, so expect a more complete review in a few days. For now, I’ll say this:

When it works, it works brilliantly. Take, for instance, the first chapter. It describes the machinations of Mrs. Bennet, trying to find suitors for her five daughters, while her husband cleans his musket and complains about the zombie epidemic. It ends with this chestnut.

“The business of Mr. Bennet’s life was to keep his daughters alive. The business of Mrs. Bennet’s was to get them married.”

Seth Grahame-Smith deserves kudos for maintaining Jane Austen’s tone, even as the Bennet sisters fight a horde of undead that interrupted their formal ball.

Unfortunately, the joke has already started to wear thin by page 60, so will see if Grahame-Smith has any other tricks up his sleeve besides the bizarre juxtaposition.

I figure this is going to be fabulously good or fabulously awful. Either way, it’s bound to be fabulous.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. “Zombies” is the perfect third noun to follow “Pride” and “Prejudice.”

Try other substitutions. Pride and Prejudice and Pirates; Pride and Prejudice and Mallrats; Pride and Prejudice and Delonte West… Nothing can top “Zombies.”