A Very Marley Christmas

My kids love having books read to them, they never pass up an offer to hear a story and two books at bedtime is a must in our routine. Now, I know that don't make my kids special...lots of kids love to be read to. But I noticed recently that my kids don't usually laugh at stories when I read to them. I noticed this because a reading of A Very Marley Christmas elicits many giggles and squeals of delight from both my children.

A couple of weeks ago I plugged the original Bad Dog, Marley! as well as the adult novel which it is based on. And by now, you've probably seen the commercial for the movie version, Marley & Me, which hits theatres Christmas day. A Very Marley Christmas is a new kids picture book that revisits Marley and his humans as they celebrate their first Christmas together. My kids adore this book and hang on my every word as I read it to them. Marley's antics crack them up - from getting tangled up in the outdoor Christmas lights to peeing on the Christmas tree - judging from my children's reaction, this is just about the funniest book ever written.

What's my point? I don't know!? But if you've got a child on your holiday shopping list between the ages of 3 and 10, you can't go wrong with a copy of this jolly holiday tale that's sure to bring some smiles and giggles from the little ones in your life.

Marley & Me & Me

One of my little mini-goals in life is to select a book and read it before it is made into a movie. That's not likely to happen since I mostly read non-fiction books about tacky tourist attractions and biographies of Walt Disney. It doesn't count if I read the book knowing they are making a movie of it, like I did with Striptease, and I think we'll all agree that The Cat in the Hat doesn't count either. But thanks to a new movie with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, I've come kind of close to meeting my goal.


A few years ago while selecting storybooks for my kids, I picked up a book called Bad Dog, Marley! It's a picture book about a family that adopts a dog and he turns out to be a little too much for them to handle. I thought the book was above average and the kids really enjoyed it and we ended up checking it out of the library a handful of times. Then one Christmas somebody gave us a copy and the story then entered into a permanent rotation in our bedtime story lineup.


I decided to see if the author, John Grogan, had written any other books. It turns out, the book we had been reading was a kiddie version of an adult non-fiction novel called "Marley & Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog." There was also a junior novelization of the novel. I picked up the junior novelization and planned to read it aloud to Elias while Tanner was taking his naps. (*minor spoiler alert) While leafing through the book I noticed a caption under a picture that read "One of the last pictures we took of Marley". It sounded like that book was not going to have a happy ending so I passed on reading it to Elias.


I later picked up the full length version of the book and read it at the beach this past summer. It's a very entertaining tale of a young couple who adopts a puppy which quickly grows up to become one crazy dog. I'm not that fond of dogs...or animals in general for that matter...but I found the book to be a really good read.

Anywho...sometime shortly before I picked up the original novel, it was announced that there was to be a major motion picture based on the book Marley & Me. There's been a teaser trailer out for a while, and the studio just released a full trailer with clips from the film. I gotta say, every clip in the trailer is from a scene in the book. It looks like it's going to be a good film. The kids are excited to see it....and YES, I have prepared them for the possible ending!

Here's the new trailer:

Whoooo Cares?

I've read not a word of any Harry Potter book, nor have I seen frame-one of any of the films yet I suspect that the infamous death that occurs in the new book is the owl? Right? Am I right? The owl gets it in the end? Is that who dies!?

Ed's Bookshelf: Ask Ernest

My collection of crap doesn't just end with my videos and old amusement park brochures, I have also accumulated quite a collection of non-best selling books that would make a librarian gag. So we're going to kick off a new feature here at WWoB called "Ed's Bookshelf". To kick things off we present this literary masterpiece ASK ERNEST by Ernest P. Worrell (1993, Rutledge Hill Press) I'm a big fan of Ernest on both the small and big screens but his downhome slapstick act doesn't translate too well to paper. This book is filled with odd graphics and lame jokes and somehow manages to miss the goofy charm that Jim Varney's character used to sell hundreds of different products in thousands of commercials during the 1980's. It's kind of on the level of CRACKED magazine, and reminds me of a joke book you would have got through the Schoolastic book club in the 6th grade. ASK ERNEST came out sometime between the fourth and fifth Ernest films. As you can see from the front cover featured here, I didn't even pick it up new...I got it at some clearance book store at an outlet mall several years later. Still, I'm a big fan of Ernest and this is a nice little piece of Ernest history.

Here's a sample of some of the high-brow comedy you'll find inside: