What I'm Pinning: Tearable Literary Puns

Given my unrelenting enthusiasm for Christian Bale, it should come as no surprise I'll be excited to see The Dark Knight Rises.

Given that I'm an unrelenting book nerd, I can't get this imaginary mash-up out of my brain: Everything the Dark Knight Rises Must Converge, a film by Christopher Nolan and Flannery O'Connor. An embittered Bruce Wayne with delusions of moral superiority must confront his own inadequacies when his butler Alfred suffers a fatal stroke after a confrontation with a Catwoman, who takes his condescending gesture of friendliness amiss. (Summary written with the help of The New York Public Library Literature Companion.) 

Of course I've read Flannery O'Connor; if you go to Catholic school long enough, you'll be forced to do so at nunpoint. 

On a recent episode of The Simpsons, Bart's fourth grade class was about to read Death in Venice. I looked it up - Thomas Mann's 1912 novella (Der Tod in Venedig in the original German) about a middle-aged man's infatuation with a physically beautiful teenage Italian boy is so not appropriate for a classroom of fourth graders.



I'm about to spoil the ending for you now, so look away if you'd like to read Thomas Mann and be surprised. (But, um, the title is kind of a give-away anyway.)

I thought of another mash-up: Lover Reborn in Venice by J.R. Ward and Thomas Mann. At the end of the novel, Blay and Qhuinn make meaningful eye contact. Qhuinn rises from his chair to make his way over to Blay, then drops dead.

James Jones' delicious literary pun in From Here to Eternity is to name the brothel The New Congress Hotel, a wicked play on the word "Congress." Not the kind of Congress that contained Paul Tsongas. (Yep, that's another Simpsons reference.)

I stayed at the Congress Plaza hotel in downtown Chicago, and I don't remember seeing any hookers there. Great brunch buffet, though.



But I'm not the only one with a penchant for literary puns, as evidenced by these pins.



The Hunger Games seems to lend itself to quite a few of these. If I were to do a Peeta meme, mine would say, "You call her the girl on fire? I call her the Girl on Top."



This one cracks me up.