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"Not Your Mother's Jane Austen" Books & Bars Guest Post on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

This month's guest post from Jeff Kamin at Minneapolis' Books & Bars focuses on their discussion of the New York Times bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and this month, they invited the author to join them for the discussion via Skype! I love the "you were there" feeling we now get to the discussion. I for one was fascinated to find out how many times Seth had to read Pride and Prejudice to write the book. By the way, since Jeff's last post, Books & Bars was named Minneapolis' best reading series by CityPages which praised it for becoming "an indespensable means for promoting reading within the community, giving new meaning to the term 'literary buzz.'" Kudos.

Seth Grahame-Smith chatted with Books & Bars via Skype video. It was our first video chat with an author and a rousing success we hope to repeat soon. A movie screen on stage held his image while we sat in the theater with a couple microphones to ask him questions. He could see us as though he was sitting towards the back of the theater and also see his own image the movie screen. We discussed his smash hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which pokes broader fun at the social changes taking place in Jane Austen’s classic and his other projects for about 45 minutes. Then had time to have our regular discussion without him (another 45 min), making for a good balance. Seth was thoroughly engaging and entertaining, even breaking some secret scoops for us. Topics included the process of writing a mash-up, late night humor, how anything + ninjas = awesome, the drunken washwoman defense, zombies as a metaphor (marriage, etc.), and much more. I’ll let you see for yourselves from the two 8-minute video clips. If you had a particular question you were wondering about, ask me, we may’ve gotten an answer.

Next month – non-fiction (!): June 9th we cover Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach.

Please comment here, there, in a car, by a bar, with a goat, on a boat, anywhere (otherwise we’re just yelling into a dark cave): Books & Bars, Mustache Robots, and Twitter.

Thanks for reading,
Jeff Kamin
Moderator, Books & Bars
jeff AT booksandbars DOT com

Book Club as Metaphor -- Guest Post from Jeff Kamin's Books & Bars

Here is this month's guest post from Jeff Kamin, moderator of Minneapolis' Books & Bars book club. This week the group met to discuss Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and it sounds like it was a hit. Read about last month's discussion of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed here. And I'm very much looking forward to hearing about next month's book - zombies!

Books & Bars’ 60th meeting was a rousing success with the right crowd, comments, weather, new sound system and more. But the star was the perfect book choice, Kafka on the Shoreby Haruki Murakami. Easily my favorite since I’ve been blogging about needing a better book and one of my top ten of our 60 picks.

Kafka on the Shore was like one long, strange, beautifully haunting dream. Readers had lots of questions. No one really had concrete answers, but we all seemed to enjoy the trip. The story deals with a retelling of the Oedipus myth, music, talking cats, living ghosts, Colonel Sanders, dangers of living in the past, and trying to live in the present. Imagine Holden Caulfield as Oedipus’ son in modern day Japan directed by David Lynch. Everything is a metaphor.

Whew, and that’s just scratching the surface.

Murakami has said it "contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write."

I’ll read it again when I have a chance. I love how a book changes with what you bring to it. Where you are in life at the time of reading affects it and how none of us ever reads the same book as our neighbor. We all imagine different things.

Over 100 gathered to dissect and praise it. We had people sneaking in over fire code, shhh…Usually when we all love it, it makes for a less interesting conversation, but not with the riddler, Murakami at the helm.

Next month we cover the "IT LIT" sensation, Pride and Prejudice and Zombiesby Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. It’s sold out everywhere. Our sponsor store, Magers & Quinn, sold 100 copies already. Grahame-Smith will be joining Books & Bars via Skypefor a discussion of his mash-up on May 12th. Should be brain-eating fun.

Jeff Kamin
Moderator
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