book club

This is from a Washington Post Invitational contest some time ago. Readers were asked to combine the works of two authors, and to provide a suitable description of the merged book. The prizewinners:

"Where's Walden?" - Alas, the challenge of locating Henry David Thoreau in each richly-detailed drawing loses its appeal when it quickly becomes clear that he is always in the woods.

"Catch-22 in the Rye" - Holden learns that if you're insane, you'll probably flunk out of prep school, but if you're flunking out of prep school, you're probably not insane.

"2001: A Space Iliad"- The Hal 9000 computer wages an insane 10-year war against the Greeks after falling victim to the Y2K bug.

"Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi"- Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling's theory that the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia.

"The Maltese Faulkner" - Is the black bird a tortured symbol of Sam's struggles with race and family? Does it signify his decay of soul along with the soul of the Old South? Is it merely a crow, mocking his attempts to understand? Or is it worth a cool mil?

"Jane Eyre Jordan" - Plucky English orphan girl survives hardships to lead the Chicago Bulls to the NBA championship.

"Looking for Mr. Godot"- A young woman waits for Mr. Right to enter her life. She has a loooong wait.

"The Scarlet Pimpernel Letter" - An 18th-century English nobleman leads a double life, freeing comely young adulteresses from the prisons of post-Revolution France.

"Lorna Dune" - An English farmer, Paul Atreides, falls for the daughter of a notorious rival clan, the Harkonnens, and pursues a career as a giant worm jockey in order to impress her.

"The Remains of the Day of the Jackal" - A formal English butler puts his loyalty to his employer above all else, until he is persuaded to join a plot to assassinate Charles deGaulle.

"The Invisible Man of La Mancha"- Don Quixote discovers a mysterious elixir, which renders him invisible. He proceeds to go on a mad rampage of corruption and terror, attacking innocent people in the streets and all the while singing "To Fight the Invisible Man!" until he is finally
stopped by a windmill.

"Planet of the Grapes of Wrath" - Astronaut lands on mysterious planet, only to discover that it is his very own home planet of Earth, which has been taken over by the Joads, a race of dirt-poor corn farmers who miraculously developed rudimentary technology and regained the ability to
speak after exposure to nuclear radiation.

"Paradise Lost in Space"- Satan, Moloch, and Belial are sentenced to spend eternity in a flying saucer with a goofy robot, an evil scientist, and two annoying children.

"The Exorstentialist" - Camus psychological thriller about a priest who casts out a demon by convincing it that there's really no purpose to what it's doing.

Happy Wednesday to you!