By: Christopher Moore,
on 8/26/2015
Note: Join us this Thursday, August 27, at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing for an author event with Christopher Moore. Describe your latest book. Secondhand Souls is the sequel to my bestselling novel A Dirty Job, which was about a single dad in San Francisco who gets the job of being Death and runs [...]
By: Jennie,
on 8/6/2014
What Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal did for the gospels, Fool does for King Lear.
I originally picked this up because when I saw Moore had a new one out, The Serpent of Venice*, I put a hold on it, only to discover it was a sequel. So, of course I went back and read Fool.
Now, I’ve never read Lear, but that’s ok. Moore’s book might have been smarter and funnier if I were more familiar with the source material, but it’s plenty smart and plenty hilarious without it.
Basically, Fool is a hilarious retelling of King Lear form the Fool’s perspective. The Fool sees everything around him, and in Moore’s version, ends up driving most of the plot (with some help from the Weird Sisters, on loan from MacBeth.)
Much like Lamb, while the commentary and the book are very smart and well done, it’s also super-raunchy and full of swearing, sex, and anachronism. This is Moore at his best. Slightly offensive, very “earthy” and extremely smart. This reminds me that Moore is one of my favorite authors for a reason.
*If Fool = Lear, I assume Serpent of Venice = Merchant of Venice
Book Provided by... my local library
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By: Maryann Yin,
on 5/5/2014
Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar this week.
To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.
The Friends and Volunteers of the Ocean City Free Public Library have planned its Annual Author Tea. Join in on Thursday, May 8th at the Flanders Hotel starting 2 p.m. (Ocean City, NJ)
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By: Powell's Staff,
on 4/29/2014
It's spring! The sun is shining. The flowers are in bloom. The Blazers are winning (fingers crossed). We're in a good mood. So for our latest round of Required Reading, we lined up our 25 favorite funny novels. Whether biting, riotous, savage, or slapstick, each of these books consistently makes us laugh. ÷ ÷ ÷ [...]
By: Maryann Yin,
on 4/29/2014
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We’ve collected the books debuting on Indiebound’s Indie Bestseller List for the week ending April 27, 2014–a sneak peek at the books everybody will be talking about next month.
(Debuted at #5 in Hardcover Fiction) The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore: “Venice, a long time ago. Three prominent Venetians await their most loathsome and foul dinner guest, the erstwhile envoy from the Queen of Britain: the rascal-Fool Pocket. This trio of cunning plotters—the merchant, Antonio; the senator, Montressor Brabantio; and the naval officer, Iago—have lured Pocket to a dark dungeon, promising an evening of sprits and debauchery with a rare Amontillado sherry and Brabantio’s beautiful daughter, Portia.” (April 2014)
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By: Desiree,
on 4/26/2014
William Shakespeare may have performed for royalty, but he wrote for the cheap seats. In The Serpent of Venice (the sequel to Fool), Christopher Moore once again follows in the Bard's bawdy footsteps. The Serpent of Venice finds Pocket (a lewd and vengeful fellow) caught up in someone else's plot in Othello's vengeful Venice. He [...]
| 50 Book Pledge | Book #29: Sacré Bleu by Christopher Moore |
I present a passage from HarperCollins‘ To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
“This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience—Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.”
“Atticus, you must be wrong. . . .”
“How’s that?”
“Well, most folks seem to think they’re right and you’re wrong. . . .”
“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions,” said Atticus, “but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
By: Betsy Bird,
on 2/10/2012
*Spoilers Included!*
Fact: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new book from Christopher Paul Curtis is a great good thing.
Fact: There is a new book out there. It is by Christopher Paul Curtis.
Opinion: It doesn’t work.
When you hand a kid a Christopher Paul Curtis novel you can rest safe and secure in the knowledge that the book you’re handing over is going to have humor leavened with little moments of surprising heart and clarity. You know that the title is going to make an era from the past more real to the child reader than any number of history textbooks at school. You know this. And the remarkable thing about The Mighty Miss Malone, Mr. Curtis’s newest novel, is that it manages to accomplish all these things, and accomplish them well, without being a particularly good book. There are times when Mighty Miss Malone sparkles and crackles and comes to life on the page. Of course there are. This is Christopher Paul Curtis we’re talking about here. But those moments are buried deep beneath a plot that is at times quite slow, a protagonist that is passive, and a plot twist that seemed so nice he used it twice. Mr. Curtis is one of our finest writers for young people working today and this is not his finest work. It’s fine. Not great.
If you were paying close attention to the book Bud Not Buddy then you might have caught a glimpse of a girl named Deza Malone when Bud stopped in a Hooverville for a while. Turns out that there’s more to her situation than meets the eye. A formidable student and smart gal, Deza spends much of her time defending her older (yet shorter) troublemaking brother Jimmie. But when their father has a horrible accident out on Lake Michigan everything changes for the worse. The man who returns to them seems like their dad but there’s something different about him. Before they know it he’s left town to find work, their landlord kicks them out of their home, and their mother is determined to go to Flint, Michigan to find Deza’s dad as well as some work of her own. Sometimes the biggest plans are the most difficult to carry out, though. And sometimes help comes from the most unexpected of places.
A quick note: If ever you heard the words “Spoiler Alert” you are hearing them now. I have every intention of giving away every plot twist, every surprise ending, every little secret Mr. Curtis has tucked away in the folds of this novel. Should you wish to be surprised by ANYTHING in the book, cease and desist with reading this review right now. Seriously, I don’t want to ruin something for you that you might really enjoy. Go. Shoo. Scat. Off with you unless you’re fine with that (or have read the book already). All gone? Then let’s begin.
I think the key to the novel lies in its creation. In a note to the reader, Mr. Curtis recounts how the idea for this book came into being. He was invited to speak to an African American mother-daughter book club in Detroit about Newbery winner Bud Not Buddy. “Big mistake”. According to him the minute he walked in he was confronted by some of the moms wondering what exactly happened when that random girl in the Hooverville kissed B
By: Betsy Bird,
on 11/15/2011
I have nothing but respect for contemporary historians. A few of them, let us be honest, are rock stars. They have to take something as strange and ephemeral as knowledge (such as it stands) about the past and make it into something relevant and interesting and coherent. These days historians also need to make sure they don’t follow in the footsteps of their forefathers and just focus everything on white people. I grant that it was easier to write history when it came down to just a single ethnicity, but talk about restrictive! Then there are the historians for children. They have to not only do all the aforementioned steps, but make history as accurate and simple, without being simplistic, as possible. It would be difficult enough to do all of this if your book was about a person or a country. Now imagine the challenge that comes from writing about the entire history of humankind in a scant 188 pages. With pictures, no less. Leave it up to the Canadians to get it right. Toronto historian Christopher Moore does his best to render an entire world in a single book without putting the whippersnapper young readers to sleep. That he manages it has got to be some kind of miracle right there.
As Moore says in his Preface, “When does a history of the world – even a short history of the world – start? This history starts with people.” So it is that we are plunged into the past. From rice farmers in China to The Great Pyramid of Giza. From Cleopatra to Martin Luther. Though he can only provide the barest of overviews, Moore takes care to give history a kind of structure, allowing student readers the chance to find the aspects that interest them the most for future study on their own. The book includes an explanation of BCE and CE vs. BC and AD in an Author’s Note, as well as an Index and a map on the endpapers of places named in the text. Very oddly, no Bibliography appears here. Strange indeed.
The endpapers of this book, displaying a map with highlighted locations, pretty much give you a blunt encapsulation of where Moore’s attention is going to focus in this text. You can sort of tell that the author is a Canadian right off the bat since L’Anse aux Meadows and Ramah Bay make the cut. The map identifies places that will come up in the text. Folks will undoubtedly object to the areas of the world that seemingly do not warrant a mention, but don’t be fooled. Just because a major metropolitan area in Australia doesn’t appear on the map that doesn’t mean that it has been excised from Moore’s history. A cursory examination of the Index yields at least 18 pages where the lands, and the Aborigines, are mentioned.
As for the text itself, Moore has been exceedingly careful. He starts off with the hominids of Africa, gives an overview of how they spread, launches into the Ice Age, goes into the whole hunter/gatherer society thing, and next thing you know you’re in the next chapter, “Learning to Farm”. He doesn’t mince words, this guy. As you read, you realize that Moore’s focus
From Then to Now sounds wonderful! I’ll be placing a hold for this one today. Thanks.
Intriguing! I will order a copy of this for my own enlightenment, and will probably end up shelving it as a prequel/companion/fifth-cousin to Joy Hakim’s ambitious “The Story of US” series.
Clarifications — By “shelving,” I mean informally in my own personal collection, and by “prequel” I mean that, because it is a single volume, a younger reader who is daunted by the multi-volume Hakim series might fiind this an enticing way to get a world overview, and then be interested enough to focus in on the U.S. in the Hakim series. (That’s what I get for writing comments before I’ve had breakfast! lol)
After reading your entire review I was relieved that you were not recommending a history of the world by that other Christopher Moore. After what he did in “Lamb”, the mind boggles at his creation of history of the world for young’uns. Not that it wasn’t hysterically funny.
(http://www.chrismoore.com/lamb.html )