My Sumer Reading List

Tiamatlock, by Agatha Chrishkigal.  Novelization of the TV show pilot about an aging sea goddess who can only solve crimes that occur within 500 yards of the Pacific Ocean, because the further she gets from water, the weaker she becomes.

Enkidu Or Die, by John Updikurbanipal.  In this, Updikurbanipal’s sequel to The Centaur, the Gilgamesh legend plays out in a modern high school where hell is gym class, heaven is the teacher's lounge, and life on earth is an endless football game. 

The Ziggurat Patrol, by Alistair MacLeananapalus.  A World War II thriller about a team of special agents, all descended from Assyrian warriors, who fight the Nazis using spears and chariots.  And one of them is a traitor.

 

Enki See, Enkidu, by H. Rider Haggardalulu.  Enkidu and Gilgamesh are reincarnated as Sir Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, whose quest to discover the source of the Nile stumbles upon a secret city of super-intelligent African apes bent on world conquest.

Akkadia, by Tom Stopparderabum.  A play that takes place in ancient Nineveh, Tenth Century Alhambra, and modern-day England.

The Ruins of Ur-Ur, by Heinrich Schliemannilishu.  The first book in The Ur Trilogy, during which the world’s first city is revealed to have been built on the ruins of an even older city.  The sequels, which will detail the discovery of two even more ancient sites, will be called The Gates of Ur-Ur-Ur, and The Ghost of Ur-Ur-Ur-Ur.

Enkidoodle Dandy, by L. Frank Baumeshtar.  A children’s book about a young Sumerian fighter’s battle for freedom which is actually a disguised allegory about the American Revolution.

 

Inanna of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgominurta.  The goddess of love, fertility and warfare is mistakenly sent to the owners of a farm on Prince Edward Island and proceeds to lay waste to half of Canada.  The only way to stop her is by calling up an even greater power, which takes places in the sequel, Cthulhu of Green Gables.

 

Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore

The other day, I was searching online for an image that might go well with the phrase “incurable romantic.” This is because I was working on a speech—well, more like a riff, really—about curable romantics. 

What is a curable romantic?  Somebody who only catches yearning like the flu?  Somebody who wants to believe that love conquers less than all--like maybe Poland but not the rest of Europe?  Somebody who wades into the idea of love, but only up to the knees, because sharks? And is there a vaccine for this?  How exactly do you cure a curable  romantic—besides forcing a man to watch Jennifer Aniston movies, and a woman to watch a man watching American football?  (After which you become an incurable cynic.)  (So what’s a curable cynic then?  Besides maybe Scrooge before he’s visited by the ghosts.  Or is Scrooge a curable misanthrope?) 

(You get the idea—I’m an incurable monologist.) 

 

So I go to Google Images and I type in the phrase "incurable romantic," and I get a screen that looks like this—

 

—where 9 out of 20 images refer back to the same phrase:  

ME:  Now THAT’S something you don’t see every day.

MY LIBIDO:  File under S for sadly.

And when I click on the image, I start reading about this artist called Harland Miller, who creates paintings like old Penguin book covers, with the craziest titles ever.  Which sent me to his website, which I scrolled through while I opened up another window and started searching for all the Penguin paintings of his that I could find. 

There are a ton of them out there.  Some of my favorites are below.  And if you want to read about Miller, here’s his website:

 

 

Harland Miller website


(I especially like the Hemingway and the Mailer titles. Not just because I’d pay cash money to read them, but because, when I think about it, I kind of already have.)

 

 

 

 

 

As far as I'm concerned

The only good thing about this:

. . . is that this is now in print again: