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The Book of Sequels
The Book of Sequels
144 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 1990
22 people want to read
About the author
Henry N. Beard
111 books38 followersHenry N. Beard (born ca. 1945) is an American humorist, one of the founders of the magazine National Lampoon and the author of several best-selling books.
Beard, a great-grandson of Vice President John C. Breckinridge, was born into a well-to-do family and grew up at the Westbury Hotel on East 69th Street in Manhattan. His relationship with his parents was cool, to judge by his quip "I never saw my mother up close."
He attended the Taft School, where he was a leader at the humor magazine, and he decided to become a humorous writer after reading Catch-22.
He then went to Harvard University from which he graduated in 1967 and joined its humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon, which circulated nationally. Much of the credit for the Lampoon's success during the mid 1960s is given to Beard and Douglas Kenney, who was in the class a year after Beard's. In 1968, Beard and Kenney wrote the successful parody Bored of the Rings.
In 1969, Beard, Kenney and Rob Hoffman became the founding editors of the National Lampoon, which reached a monthly circulation of over 830,000 in 1974 (and the October issue of that year topped a million sales). One of Beard's short stories published there, "The Last Recall", was included in the 1973 Best Detective Stories of the Year. During the early 1970s, Beard was also in the Army Reserve, which he hated.
In 1975 the three founders cashed in on a buy-out agreement for National Lampoon; and Beard left the magazine. After an "unhappy" attempt at screenwriting, he turned to writing humorous books.
Beard, a great-grandson of Vice President John C. Breckinridge, was born into a well-to-do family and grew up at the Westbury Hotel on East 69th Street in Manhattan. His relationship with his parents was cool, to judge by his quip "I never saw my mother up close."
He attended the Taft School, where he was a leader at the humor magazine, and he decided to become a humorous writer after reading Catch-22.
He then went to Harvard University from which he graduated in 1967 and joined its humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon, which circulated nationally. Much of the credit for the Lampoon's success during the mid 1960s is given to Beard and Douglas Kenney, who was in the class a year after Beard's. In 1968, Beard and Kenney wrote the successful parody Bored of the Rings.
In 1969, Beard, Kenney and Rob Hoffman became the founding editors of the National Lampoon, which reached a monthly circulation of over 830,000 in 1974 (and the October issue of that year topped a million sales). One of Beard's short stories published there, "The Last Recall", was included in the 1973 Best Detective Stories of the Year. During the early 1970s, Beard was also in the Army Reserve, which he hated.
In 1975 the three founders cashed in on a buy-out agreement for National Lampoon; and Beard left the magazine. After an "unhappy" attempt at screenwriting, he turned to writing humorous books.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 7, 2007
Coffee table book best suited for English nerds -- it's a collection of joke sequels to literary masterpieces. Some of the content is better than the rest, but in my opinion, the entire book is worth it for the following:
-comic book version of "Waiting for Godot"
and my favorite,
-full color illustration of T.S. Eliot's theme park "The Waste Land!" where you can go 'round the prickly pear, visit the Chambers of the Sea lounge to see sea-girls wreathed in red and brown, see fear in a handful of dust, and ride the boats with Elizabeth and Leicester.
-comic book version of "Waiting for Godot"
and my favorite,
-full color illustration of T.S. Eliot's theme park "The Waste Land!" where you can go 'round the prickly pear, visit the Chambers of the Sea lounge to see sea-girls wreathed in red and brown, see fear in a handful of dust, and ride the boats with Elizabeth and Leicester.
June 18, 2008
You read the original...what happens next?
The Romeo & Juliet sequel is probably my favorite with its absurd loquacity begging to be read aloud.
The Romeo & Juliet sequel is probably my favorite with its absurd loquacity begging to be read aloud.
May 22, 2009
Two of my all time favorites are the "Zeno's Paradox Workout" and "The Slaves of Atlanta" (Gone with the Wind a la Tama Janowitz).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 17, 2024
I bought this when it was fairly new, so 33 or 34 years ago. I looked in it a couple of times over the years, mostly looking for satirical inspiration, but never read more than a page or two after flipping through. To be honest, I would probably have given this a five-star rating if I'd read it in its day. But satire can suffer badly from the passage of time, and quite a lot of this is dated, obscure, or has otherwise not aged well.
A case in point is the lengthiest piece, "Raise the Pequod!" near the end, which takes up 31 of the 144 pages of the book, a huge percentage of the whole thing. The piece is a satire of Melville, of Clive Cussler, of the movie The Hunt for Red October, of Robert Ludlum, and of suspense thrillers in general. The first page of it is such a brutal pastiche of the bad writing conventions of the genre that I'm thinking of using it as a teaching tool; but the thing goes on and on and on and most of the folks it's picking on are dead. It made 90% of its points in the first four pages, and should have stopped there.
I expect younger readers would not even understand pieces about Noriega or the then-recently-announced sequel to Gone with the Wind. Many of the early pages are satires on GwtW and the sequels and the book, in various writing styles. I can see they were clever, but I can't now identify all the games they're playing, and there's no key in the back. As a result, the attempt to read this cover-to-cover got relegated to the bathroom, and went quite slowly. I was mostly bored until I hit a series of ads for alleged sequels: Diuretics, by W. C. Hubbard; Pet Seminary, by Stephen King; another Stephen King Book-of-the-Week thriller, Pujo - The car that chases dogs; Vegetable Farm; and Pride and Extreme Prejudice.
Lots of this is extremely clever, because the authors were the center of the National Lampoon/SNL universe. "Casey II: It Ain't Over Till It's Over" was worth reading aloud to everybody. The two-page spread of fake TV Guide listings like A&E FALKLANDS WAR - Documentary, Part I: The Gathering Drizzle; 11 THE DIVINE SITUATION COMEDY, Dante and Virgil are in a "hell" of a fix when Gluttony shows up for dinner and their new housekeeper turns out to be Sloth; and:
Tonight, 9pm TBS MOVIE - Drama
"Airport 1990." Cunning Arab terrorists
manage to hide a bomb among the inflight
meals loaded aboard a jumbo jet, but most
of the passengers fail to make the plane
because of snarled airport traffic, endless
baggage lines, incompetent airline person-
nel, or missed connections, and the few
who do manage to board the doomed air-
craft escape serious harm when the explo-
sive device detonates while the 747 is still
in the middle of a 2-hour take-off line on
the runway and the force of the blast is ab-
sorbed by hundreds of trays of rubbery
lasagna.
Loved the ad for 2000: A Space Iliad. Ditto I Was a Teenage Beowulf. The ad for The Library of Yiddish Sequels ("If you're the type of serious reader who wishes Doctor Faustus had been a podiatrist, this is the club for you!"), including titles like The Electric Kool-Aid Hasid Test and The Bris of San Luis Rey. And Oy! Wilderness, of course.
There is also a significant addition to the Apocrypha: The Chain Letter of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians. It's funny to those of us who remember chain letters as a thing (as opposed to FaceBook memes and homework assignments), but now only theologians would really get a kick out of it.
I was amused, but also bored. Wish I'd read it through in its day, I guess.
A case in point is the lengthiest piece, "Raise the Pequod!" near the end, which takes up 31 of the 144 pages of the book, a huge percentage of the whole thing. The piece is a satire of Melville, of Clive Cussler, of the movie The Hunt for Red October, of Robert Ludlum, and of suspense thrillers in general. The first page of it is such a brutal pastiche of the bad writing conventions of the genre that I'm thinking of using it as a teaching tool; but the thing goes on and on and on and most of the folks it's picking on are dead. It made 90% of its points in the first four pages, and should have stopped there.
I expect younger readers would not even understand pieces about Noriega or the then-recently-announced sequel to Gone with the Wind. Many of the early pages are satires on GwtW and the sequels and the book, in various writing styles. I can see they were clever, but I can't now identify all the games they're playing, and there's no key in the back. As a result, the attempt to read this cover-to-cover got relegated to the bathroom, and went quite slowly. I was mostly bored until I hit a series of ads for alleged sequels: Diuretics, by W. C. Hubbard; Pet Seminary, by Stephen King; another Stephen King Book-of-the-Week thriller, Pujo - The car that chases dogs; Vegetable Farm; and Pride and Extreme Prejudice.
Lots of this is extremely clever, because the authors were the center of the National Lampoon/SNL universe. "Casey II: It Ain't Over Till It's Over" was worth reading aloud to everybody. The two-page spread of fake TV Guide listings like A&E FALKLANDS WAR - Documentary, Part I: The Gathering Drizzle; 11 THE DIVINE SITUATION COMEDY, Dante and Virgil are in a "hell" of a fix when Gluttony shows up for dinner and their new housekeeper turns out to be Sloth; and:
Tonight, 9pm TBS MOVIE - Drama
"Airport 1990." Cunning Arab terrorists
manage to hide a bomb among the inflight
meals loaded aboard a jumbo jet, but most
of the passengers fail to make the plane
because of snarled airport traffic, endless
baggage lines, incompetent airline person-
nel, or missed connections, and the few
who do manage to board the doomed air-
craft escape serious harm when the explo-
sive device detonates while the 747 is still
in the middle of a 2-hour take-off line on
the runway and the force of the blast is ab-
sorbed by hundreds of trays of rubbery
lasagna.
Loved the ad for 2000: A Space Iliad. Ditto I Was a Teenage Beowulf. The ad for The Library of Yiddish Sequels ("If you're the type of serious reader who wishes Doctor Faustus had been a podiatrist, this is the club for you!"), including titles like The Electric Kool-Aid Hasid Test and The Bris of San Luis Rey. And Oy! Wilderness, of course.
There is also a significant addition to the Apocrypha: The Chain Letter of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians. It's funny to those of us who remember chain letters as a thing (as opposed to FaceBook memes and homework assignments), but now only theologians would really get a kick out of it.
I was amused, but also bored. Wish I'd read it through in its day, I guess.
February 24, 2013
A collection of "sequels" of the classics. Great buy for lit dorks. It wouldn't be as funny without the illustrations.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews