By PJ Parrish
My new year got off to a rocky start. Short story: suddenly huge water bill. Plumber says there’s a leak…somewhere. Enter Mike from Gulf Coast Leak Detection. Leak is under the lawn, not the house, he says. Bill: $500 vs $10,000 to repipe house. On New Year’s Eve, I splurged on a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
So, in honor of good starts, here is some tasty brain lint about books and writers that I found for all us who are hoping for positive outcomes in 2026.
Actual photo of famous book critic Toby,
Sick Puppy
Decades ago, when I was writing my first romance, The Dancer, my cat Hilary walked across the keyboard of my Commodore and wiped out a quarter of my work. Noooo, I didn’t make a copy. But…John Steinbeck’s dog, Toby, ate half of the first manuscript of Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck didn’t make copies either and it took him two months to write it all over again.Steinbeck wrote to his agent: “I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.”
Hunka Hunka Burning Gov
Once, while doing some routine research on arcane FBI procedures, I got a screen message that said ERROR 451. This is, I found out, is HTTP code for “Unavailable For Legal Reasons,” meaning the government doesn’t want you to see it. The code comes from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 where books are infamously burned. It’s reassuring to know someone in Washington read novels.
My Golden Eye Will Be Watching You
Apropo of nothing in my life other than the fact I once got to interview Sting — The Police frontsman wrote the song “Every Breath You Take” at the same desk that Ian Fleming used to write his James Bond novels. Sting was renting the Fleming Villa in Goldeneye on the island of Jamaica while composing the famous track.
Which Might Explain Why the Coffee Tastes Like Bilge Water
Would you go to a coffee shop called Pequod’s? Whelp, that was what Gordon Bowker originally wanted to call his little coffee company because he was a Moby Dick fan and thought using the ship’s name was a nifty idea. His partner Terry Heckler thought naming a business after a doomed whaler was a bad marketing move. So now you can overpay for your Cinnamon Dolce Latte at Starbucks, named after the Pequod’s first mate.
The Allmanns, Jeff Spicoli and The Bard
Was listening to one of my fave boogie-down-the-road songs the other day — “Jessica.” Found out recently that the name — now among most popular for babies and dogs — made its first appearance in Shakespeare’s 1598 play The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare is also credited with making up over 1,000 words and phrases including “bookworm,” “bibliophile,” “critic,” “vanish into thin air,” and “gloomy.” He also gave us “gnarly” and “pukey.” Aloha, Mr. Hand.
Let Them Eat Madeleines
I don’t remember why, but many years ago I decided I needed to read Proust. Naively, I cracked open In Search of Lost Time. It became my Everest. I had to conquer it. It took me two years. If you’re into torture, give it a go. At 1.2 million words, it is one of the longest novels ever written. Second longest is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which only feels like 1.2 million words.
“A Feeling Of Sadness That Only Bus Stations Have.”
Jack Kerouac never learned to drive. He moved to New York City as a teenager on a scholarship to boarding school and then entered Columbia, so as any smart New Yorker would say, who needs wheels in the city? Through every subsequent adventure, across the country and back, down to Mexico, up from New Orleans, Kerouac always let his buddy Neal Cassady drive. Or he took Greyhound buses.
Paperback Rider
True story: When visiting DC years ago, I went to the Library of Congress on a lark just to see if my book The Dancer was there. Sure enough, it was! Then the other day, I read that In 2003, 2.5 million unsold books from the UK romance publisher Mills & Boon were used in the reconstruction of the M6 motorway. This is the company that bought the rights to my book The Dancer. My book never sold much — in US or UK — but it gives me some sick satisfaction to think that my little paperback might be helping some poor git find his way from Catthorpe, England to Gretna, Scotland. Such is the stuff of immortality.
Happy belated new year, crime dogs.
Love it, Kris. Fun stuff. So you made it through Proust? My white whale is War and Peace. Never made it past the first few chapters. I prefer the Woody Allen method. “I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
Cheers!
Or the great Cheers episode where Sam, desperate to impress Diane, reads War and Peace, finishes it, exhauted. Diane, delighted, tells him, “Great, now we can go see the movie.”
Sam: There’s a MOVIE?”
Yeah, I made it through Proust. It was like running the only marathon I did — I remember starting but everything after that was a painful blur.
Happy New Year, Kris, and thanks for this fun collection of writing trivia.
Moby Dick was my Everest. Actually more like the Marianas Trench. Agree about The Goldfinch, a good 300 page story expanded to 800 pages.
Rebuilding the M6 with books is a cool legacy—art that’s also useful.
I confess that I have not read Moby Dick. I did try Ulysses. Gave up quickly.
MOBY DICK was near my period of specialization, the American Romantic Period. I’ve read it over a dozen times. After the first time, I skipped over all the whale dissections.
Thanks for these fun facts. Our entire development’s water system has antiquated pipes, and we deal with water outages caused by leaks in the system that often take days to locate.
War and Peace was assigned in high school, with a cheat sheet of names, and our teacher said, ‘Just skim it. You’ll get the gist.”
Laughing at your teacher’s remark. A wise woman.
Happy New Year, Kris! Glad your plumbing repair bill is an only fraction of what it might have been. We need a new drainage pipe here–more expensive than your yard plumbing fix, but still much cheaper than replacing all the indoor pipes.
I never got past our narrator getting down that hill in the opening of “Moby Dick.” Really should give it another go. On the other hand, when I picked up “Great Expectations,” I was genuinely surprised at how readable it was, with a compelling first person narrator.
Here’s to positive outcomes in 2026.
I did finish Don Quixote. But I had to for university lit course. I kinda liked it. I really shud give Moby Dick a try. The story’s themes are so enduring. Right now am reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty. I found a ratty paperback in a used book store but the thing is over 850 pages and it literally fell apart in my hands at night. The husband got me a new copy for Christmas, so back in I go. What a storyteller…
Comical and fascinating, Kris. Win-win! I had no idea Shakespeare invented so many of our everyday words. Love that.
Yeah, he was quite the inventor. I got a little into the weeds researching this and had a long list of really hilarious words and phrases he made up. But “pukey?” Had to include that one.
I read the Odyssey in the eighth grade. I figured after that I didn’t have to read anything I didn’t enjoy.
I love learning all the little tidbits you shared. I’d read about the words Shakespeare created one night when I couldn’t sleep and was scrolling through the web. Happy Nee Year to everyone!
I had to read the Odyssey in high school as well. I remember it only through cheezy toga movies, however. But it DID lead me to discover Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, and that gave me a lifelong love of Greek and Roman myths. Serves me well at Jeopardy and crosswords.
We had to read The Odyssey (or was it the Iliad? or both?) in Latin class in high school. No memories at all.
There’s a major motion picture version of the poem coming out soon. Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Zendaya as Athena. Not a movie I’ll be looking forward to.
“Every Breath You Take” is on the top of almost every “Stalker Song” list. The connection with James Bond works there, too.
I only had to read the first volume of Proust’s memoir for a class on French Classics in Translation. I’ve suffered through worse. PAMELA by Samual Richardson is my novel from Hell. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of Pamela’s letters to a friend about being held captive by a cad who intends to r*pe her. I ended up rooting for the r*pist just for the novel to be over.
A tale of two of my high school fellow alums and writing.
Cornell Haynes c/o 1992 or 3, I forget. Scholar athlete, football. Voted ‘Most likely to be class clown.’ Better than average poet. On Spotify you can find him listed as Nelly.
John Willimans c/0 1929. Not the best student. Almost flunked out. Went to Washington University where he was thrown out of the drama department. Moved south. Wrote a play or two under his nickname. Tennessee Willams. I graduated from the same high school as my mother in law. She had a teacher who used the line, “I failed Tennessee Williams I can fail you” in class.
Happy New Year!!
Fun post, Kris. I love the Steinbeck quote about his dog’s critique. Reminds me of the scene in The Art of Racing in the Rain when the dog grabs a written contract out of his owner’s hands, runs out of the house, and defiles it. Hilarious.
Moby Dick was difficult for me to read because of the interminably loooonng sentences. By the time I got to the end of some of those sentences, I couldn’t remember how they started.
On the other hand, I loved the Iliad and the Odyssey.