Here in the AAUGH.com Reference Library, we have a section for “Not That Charlie Brown”, which has a couple of biographies of people named Charlie Brown in it. (We do keep the biography of Charlie Brown, Schulz’s co-worker for whom he named the character, separate.)

Now I find that released-but-temporarily-unavailable is the book Waiting for Charlie Brown, and while I cannot get a copy (that’s what “temporarily unavailable” means!), I’m wondering whether it should go in that section as well. It’s described as a “rough Southern poem novel”, and the closest I can find to an explanation to the title is in the video here, where one of the authors says that “Charlie Brown is a metaphor for death”. At least, I think that’s what he says. Oh, I suppose the fact that they’re calling their reading tour the “Charlie Brown Field Goal Kickin Poetry Tour” is suggestive that yes, they mean to be invoking the little boy with the zig-zag shirt in their title… but I still don’t know if the Peanuts crew is invoked anywhere but in the title, much less how well they serve the work creatively. But suddenly I do want to see a drawing of the grim reaper wearing a yellow robe with a black zig-zag on it…

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