If you were a genius, would you use your smarts for good or evil? I know I would use it for evil, but that’s just me. This means I have something in common with the ubergenius Oliver Watson, who is the main character of Josh Lieb’s novel I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President.

Josh Lieb hasn’t written any other books besides this one, but why would he have to when he’s a four- time-Emmy-winning executive producer of The Daily Show. Josh lives in New York City with his wife and son. I don’t know what drove Josh to write this book; perhaps he himself is an evil genius!

Oliver Watson, a seventh grader at Gale Sayers Middle School in Omaha, Nebraska, has a secret. Not a secret about going out with Marcia Brady, or anything like that. Oliver is a genius, an evil one at that, with his own evil empire with minions and a secret lair. Not too many people know about his exploits as an evil genius.

I never thought I would recommend a poem first, but I had to after reading the poem “Jabberwocky” while doing a literature unit on Lewis Carroll’s works. Lewis Carroll, born in 1832, was an English author best known for writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The poem “Jabberwocky” can be found in his novel Through the Looking-Glass— a follow-up to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In the poem, Lewis Carroll makes up outlandish, yet catchy, words. He places the main characters in a distorted, unreal world filled with strange, menacing animals and beasts. It’s a poem about the relationship of a father and a son, bravery and conquest, and the joy of victory.

Even though the poem has animals, or beasts, that I have never heard of and many words you’d never find in a dictionary*, there is something very familiar about the beasts and words Carroll dreams up. They match close enough with things that are real making this nonsense, or “no-sense,” whimsical, and silly tale easy to understand.

You can read the poem here.

*[Editor’s Note: Lewis Carroll’s made-up words are often called portmanteaus, which blend two or more existing words together to form a new one. Newly-created words, in general, are referred to as “neologisms.” ]