There should be mashups for books, I think. I’m not talking about this ridiculous(ly lucrative) new trend of taking a classic book and shoehorning in some new elements, a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I’m talking about a true mashup: taking two existing pieces of art and shoving them together to make something new. With music, you take two songs and alternate bits from them and layer them together and make a new song. With books, you would take the text from two books and alternate them and run the sentences together to make a new book.
For example: “There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” From The Voyage of the Old Man in the Sea (a mashup of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Old Man in the Sea).
If you’re very, very bored and habitually come to my blog to steal my ideas, here are a few you could use to get started:
– The Unbearable Lightness of Being Earnest
– The Bleak House at Pooh Corner (which I guess would be Eeyore’s house)
– Gone With the Wind in the Willows
– Franny and Zooey and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
– A Wrinkle in the Time Traveler’s Wife (yikes)
– The Phantom of the Tollbooth Operator
– The Railway Children of the Corn
– Howard’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe
– The Lion, the Witch and the Warden (The Warden is a very short book by Trollope, in case you are not up on your 19th century novellas, and why would you be?)
Now go forth with these ideas and mash something.
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