Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...series, and the tackiness can show. Superboy, for example, is an engaging adventure series based on the comic book, but the TV hero's cheesy superantics come straight from Woolworth's. Low-rent special effects have also turned War of the Worlds -- an update of the H.G. Wells novel and 1953 movie -- into a dreary stalemate. Last season the evil aliens seemed to do little but abduct unsuspecting earthlings and transform them Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style into blank-eyed automatons to do their bidding. A second wave of aliens has arrived this season with a slightly different plan...
From this spooky, arresting premise, Umberto Eco has launched a novel that is even more intricate and absorbing than his international best seller The Name of the Rose (1983). Unlike its predecessor, Foucault's Pendulum does not restrict its range of interests to monastic, medieval arcana. This time Eco's framework is vast -- capacious enough to embrace reams of ancient, abstruse writings and a host of contemporary references or allusions. The latter include the Yellow Submarine, Casablanca, Tom and Jerry, Lina Wertmuller, Barbara Cartland, Stephen King, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flash Gordon, the Pink Panther, Minnie Mouse...
...tone of the title -- both grandiose and self-mocking -- accurately reflects the contents. Julian Barnes, whose third novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1985), earned an army of readers outside his native Britain, has here gathered a collection of prose pieces, nominally fiction, that cohere chiefly by virtue of being bound together in one book. The affair kicks off with a termite's view of the adventures of Noah and his ark. (Noah, it turns out, was not a particularly nice fellow, and his epic voyage was less than heroic in its details.) Matters then proceed through a number of other diverting...
...outline could as well describe a nature documentary or even a children's picture -- anyway, something bland, earnest or otherwise simpleminded. This is not to imply that The Bear, which is an adaptation by French filmmakers of a 1916 novel by the American outdoorsman James Oliver Curwood, lacks educational value. Or that children will not be charmed by the misadventures of its bouncy, cuddly hero. But the highest pleasures of this wondrous movie lie not in its apparently artless narrative but in the artful ways it transcends...
...archaeologist A.H. Layard uncovered the lamassu, colossal, winged bull-men that guarded the palace entrances. One hundred years later, the site was extensively re-excavated by Max Mallowan, whose mystery-writing wife Agatha Christie kept an office at the Nimrud Digs House and composed portions of an Hercule Poirot novel, Murder in Mesopotamia, at the site...