• Quiet Bubble’s appreciation of The Royal Tenenbaums riffs fruitfully on the film’s debt to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.
• If you haven’t yet caught up with Lizzie Skurnick’s wonderful “Fine Lines” feature at Jezebel, now is the time. The series revisits classics of children and YA literature. The subject of last week’s entry was Katherine Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved, a book I haven’t re-read in a long while but which I think about all the time. (Random, inside-baseball observation: Lately I’ve taken to hoping that Lizzie will write a girl detective series with a heroine named Mirabile Dictu. Or if not Lizzie, someone should write it.)
• Speaking of such, The Independent gets ten writers to share their failed darlings, the books they wrote or planned to write that never made it into print. Like Jenny, from whom I pinched the link, I was especially charmed by Amanda Cross’s entry, which begins:
I have a few “sock drawer novels” knocking around – a dreadful romantic thriller set on Capri, a historical tragedy inspired by the life of the poet Catullus and a mock-Gothic mystery involving the Brothers Grimm. All were half-written in my teens and early twenties, when I was under the delusion that fiction was about fame, money and the love of beautiful men.
Two things: 1) I would happily read any and all of those books as outlined; and 2) fame, money and the love of beautiful men are the main reasons I write: Don’t take away my dreams, Cross!