A “new” (read: repackaged) edition of the Star Wars Trilogy is coming to DVD shelves. Retro covers - neat! But no fourth bonus disc as the last set had? Bogus!

Not interested.

Maybe if it was the pre-Special Super Edition … maybe.

Well, I mean, if you win.

Hopefully. This is good, because in five years - after I repay my parents - hopefully I can pick up a place on the not-so-expensive side. Ja!

Not that I want to turn this blog into Atomic Books or the recently discovered Margaret Fisk, but lately I’ve been quite deliberately making progress through Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club.

The title refers to an actual group of 19th-century Bostonians who gathered to translate Dante’s Inferno for an American audience. Among the members of this exclusive “club” were poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poet James Russell Lowell. While poring over the poem, the men find themselves on the trail of a serial killer who tortures his victims in ways that seem to be taken straight out of the pages of Inferno. The police are at a loss and must rely on the club members’ unique knowledge of Dante’s work to help catch the killer. Pearl, a recognized Dante scholar, uses his expertise to create an absorbing and dramatic period piece. Using historical figures in a mystery setting is not a new idea (e.g., Sir Isaac Newton plays detective in Philip Kerr’s Dark Matter), but Pearl has proven himself a master.

It’s a quite engaging novel, and I’m about at the midway point. This was an impulse purchase during my Barnes & Noble run on Saturday, and I picked it up despite the prominent endorsement from Dan Brown on the front cover. In any case, good book that most current or former English majors would almost certainly likely enjoy.

My sister E. is home for a week or two, and I’m heading down to see her tomorrow. I’ve got a birthday present for her (her b-day was actually late last month, but shipping is such a bitch I figured I’d just wait until I saw her), a completely assholeish gift — a box set of the Harry Potter films, and Disney’s Robin Hood (with the animals), on DVD.

How does this make me assholeish?

She doesn’t have a DVD player.

My sister’s living arrangements on Oahu have recently changed — my cousin M., having graduated from college last spring, moved out to the island to teach, and is in fact teaching at the same school as my sister. In any case, my sis, my cousin, and one of my cousin’s college buddies moved in together. I was thinking about picking up both E. and M. gift cards from Borders, then I started thinking the roomie might feel left out, so now I’m thinking I’ll get one for each of ‘em.

Hey, who knows, maybe the roomie is hot. I mean, eventually, I’ve gotta get out that way, right?

(There’s a Best Buy gift card in with the DVDs. So she can buy a DVD player, dig?).

No, I’m not making this up.

Jesus Fucking Christ.