Light Reading

This is cool:

7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed the World

The vast majority of the knowledge humans have assembled over the centuries, has been lost. The world's geniuses either kept their revelations to themselves and then died, or else they put it down on paper which has long since rotted or burned or been used to line some parakeet's cage.

Obviously we'll never know what great books have been lost to time, but we have clues on some of them, and what those clues tell us is mind-boggling, and a little bit depressing. If you could make a library out of just books that didn't survive, you'd have a collection of some of the best freaking books ever written.

Night Light

Pulp cover art from 1936

The Future of Yesterday

From Paleo-Future, A Look Into The Future That Never Was. I love this kinda stuff.

via Posthuman Blues

Be Happy

And now for Real Books/Fake Excerpts with comic genius Dan Naturman.

One Step Closer to Zombies

"Quantum of Solace" director to lead an army of zombies.

One of the most hotly anticipated zombie (or is that post-zombie?) books finally has a director! According to Variety, the adaptation of Max Brooks' insanely popular "World War Z" has snagged Bond helmer Marc Forster for the job. It's like they didn't think it was buzzworthy enough, what with J. Michael Straczynski writing the script, and Brad Pitt's Plan B producing.

If you haven’t read the book, "World War Z" is a seriously detailed, often creepy account of the zombie apocalypse that wiped out humanity in the 2010s. Compiled by a U.N. Postwar Commission researcher, its a first-person retelling of the war that wiped out every country on the map. Forster was drawn to the project for its journalistic style. "The genre always fascinated me, and when they pitched it to me, it reminded me of the paranoid conspiracy films of the '70s like 'All the President’s Men.'"

I can't wait. The book was enjoyable and even frightening. I read it while alone in the woods before settling down next to a campfire for the evening. Yeah, kinda spooky.