tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-319825222011-07-28T19:27:58.856-04:00F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in <i>The Great Gatsby</i> that "reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope." Well, I don't reserve judgments, especially on books, so I channel my criticism here.Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.comBlogger1311100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-81696633635040061952011-02-14T01:27:00.000-05:002011-02-14T01:27:03.931-05:00

I've been remiss in my book review duties, and plan to get back on track, but for now here's some filler...um, I mean perfectly cromulent content.  In honor of Valentine's Day, here some of my favorite literary pontifications on love: "For a moment Anne's heart fluttered queerly and for the first time her eyes faltered under Gilbert's gaze and a rosy flush stained the paleness of her face. It

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-64796239310676175352010-09-16T00:07:00.005-04:002010-09-16T00:23:48.977-04:00

Ah, the cop with a traumatic past. It's a classic. Bonus points for having a dysfunctional family and a past relationship that has ruined his ability to connect with any other woman. Super double bonus points if he's a loose cannon at work.Anyway, such a figure has been the basis for many a beloved thriller/crime novel, and Tana French's Faithful Place is no exception. The rogue cop in

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-72117325551521888652010-08-16T21:03:00.004-04:002010-08-21T22:36:43.457-04:00

If you have a one-night stand with someone who becomes your best friend, is that a touching story of human connection, or a lesson in how not to have a one-night stand? Well, both.One Day, a novel by David Nicholls, explores the twenty-ish-year relationship of Dexter and Emma, two young Brits who cross paths for the first time on the night they graduate from college in 1988. The book

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-88430542776628978982010-08-12T22:56:00.008-04:002010-08-21T22:41:26.362-04:00

If you've ever wondered what keeps a friendship together over the years, I don't recommend going to an Ian McEwan book for answers--the response could be "banging the same chick" or "not much."McEwan's Amsterdam, the latest Jacob-Katy book club novel, delves into issues like the nature of friendship, as mentioned, but also explores what happens when spite bubbles up through the veneer of

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-88439615619557074832010-07-20T21:17:00.004-04:002010-07-20T21:33:49.703-04:00

While the world is obsessing about eBooks, Woody Allen has a different ultra-modern technology on his mind. Audiobooks.Audiobooks by a TechnophobeFrom the article:Q. How were you persuaded to embrace the audiobook format? Do you own or regularly use any of the high-tech gadgets that play these files? A. I was persuaded in a moment of apathy when I was convinced I had a fatal illness and

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-21851009608781931482010-07-06T07:30:00.008-04:002010-07-06T17:54:16.528-04:00

Some people think President Lincoln was gay. Some think he was a patronizer of prostitutes. Some think he was a Republican. Lots of theories, lots of dubiousness. But we can shut all the rest down, y'all, 'cause I think we have a winner: Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter, and that was the consuming issue of his life.Okay, not really. (But this seems just as plausible as the idea

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-9995583027127698742010-07-04T23:54:00.003-04:002010-07-05T00:11:29.792-04:00

Even if you haven't read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or either of its sequels, chances are you know someone who has--or at least you've seen someone with his or her nose stuck in the Swedish noir on public transportation. But if you've actually read it, you know that the writing has some...challenges. Namely, beloved tropes and repeated language that the author uses to shoehorn certain plot

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-65494774511437621682010-06-28T21:41:00.003-04:002010-06-29T00:11:44.980-04:00

Who knew there's a reclusive author out there who makes the late J.D. Salinger look like an extrovert?Britain's Daily Mail managed to score a rare and prized interview with Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the book. The catch? She won't talk about the book. Or anything relating to the book. The extent of the interview:"Thank you so much,’ she

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-27838985352140177672010-06-03T22:46:00.005-04:002010-06-04T01:05:40.163-04:00

So the New York Times announced The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list. Do we really need an article about an article? Why not just wait for the magazine to print the freaking list? Usually, this kind of hijinks is saved for the hard-hitting venues, like Access Hollywood's exclusive "Inside People's 50 Most Beautiful People List." But anyway, since it's obviously not a secret anymore, here are the

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-45843495747947902252010-05-31T00:10:00.005-04:002010-05-31T01:54:35.646-04:00

Book Expo America (BEA) this year was kind of a weird affair. Book publishing has been in death throes for a while now (if you listen to all the Chicken Little articles, anyway), but apparently books are still being signed, created, and publicized--go figure. But the times, they are a-changin' regardless. Instead of the usual four-day book bacchanalia, this year's expo was condensed to two

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-69495123490187949842010-05-26T22:48:00.015-04:002010-05-26T23:54:22.347-04:00

Every couple of years, I reread The Great Gatsby. It's my favorite book, but that's not really why I keep picking it up--I've had plenty of favorites over the years that I don't really turn back to, for fear that they won't hold up. (I've been avoiding the Memoirs of a Geisha reread for pretty much that reason.) But I know that Gatsby will. And it never disappoints--it's still as close to a

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-60635206279368015782010-05-16T16:50:00.004-04:002010-05-17T00:59:36.629-04:00

When the shortlist for this round of book club came up, I picked The Day of the Locust because it's been lauded as one of the best novels of the 20th century, and even had blurbs from author Nathanael West's contemporaries, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Malcolm Cowley. So I figured that with the lavish praise and the book's 1930s Hollywood setting, it would be somewhat

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-42333639361404377852010-05-09T23:03:00.006-04:002010-05-10T13:16:26.371-04:00

A few weeks ago I read In the Woods by Tana French, an absorbing mystery set in Dublin. I enjoyed French's style, and was enthusiastic to read what came next.The Likeness picks up, plot-wise, where its predecessor left off. But instead of following the same narrator, it focuses on Cassie Maddox, the (now former) partner of the previous protagonist, Rob Ryan. Basically, after the events of

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-50931002198875110232010-05-05T01:10:00.006-04:002010-05-05T01:40:54.489-04:00

Last week's New Yorker was one of the more satisfying ones in recent memory--and they've been on a good streak with the fiction as well.I really liked E.L. Doctorow's piece Edgemont Drive. Short, simple, meditation on dispossession and suburban priorities.And last week's story, Allegra Goodman's La Vita Nuova, was similarly punchy. I found this one poignant 'cause I identified with it more

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-52149629028274136792010-04-30T21:36:00.008-04:002010-05-01T01:00:55.540-04:00

So the latest book club book was Don DeLillo's Underworld. Jacob already has this covered, but I felt guilty not holding up my end of the book club. (Especially since I was the one who proposed this round's short list.) And this one is significant because he's our first repeat author, after we did White Noise a couple of years ago. Neither of us liked it much, but I'd tackled Americana by

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-88913706423527814112010-04-25T16:57:00.004-04:002010-04-26T00:17:49.189-04:00

Ever since Steve Jobs announced the much-rumored iPad in January, the publishing industry has been simultaneously having a collective orgasm at the possibility of a superior e-reader, and trying to figure out what the heck to do with this information.In this week's New Yorker, Ken Auletta dissects the current state of book publishing, in one of the clearest and most candid pieces I've seen on the

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-82296457123476128012010-04-22T23:03:00.009-04:002010-04-23T10:31:35.846-04:00

Cady: And they have this book, this "burn book" where they write mean things about girls in our grade.Janis: Well what does it say about me?Cady: You're not in it.Janis: Those bitches!I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I do love a good literary slap fight.I was reading an article today (courtesy of JF) that authors should pay it forward with blurbs--meaning that if they've received the

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-68510163615045107882010-04-11T19:13:00.004-04:002010-04-11T23:48:07.620-04:00

Having spent a fair bit of time lately reading books by writers more concerned with esoteric leaps of plot and logic than with with basic readability (looking at you, Underworld), I've come to appreciate stories that have a beginning, middle, and end. And they don't get much more beginning-middle-and-end-y than a mystery. So for that, I definitely appreciated Tana French's debut novel In the

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-52967000858346520072010-03-27T17:57:00.004-04:002010-03-27T23:41:36.578-04:00

I'm one of the many people who loved Joshua Ferris's debut novel, Then We Came to the End. But I had no idea how he'd follow that up. Would he do another first-person-plural book? Put out another book solidifying his status as the voice of cubicle ennui?Nope on both counts. The Unnamed is his second, and it's completely different from the first--but similarly unsettling. It's the story

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-35671064756167481752010-03-20T17:09:00.004-04:002010-03-21T02:04:02.312-04:00

Earlier this year, Jacob and I were inspired by this McSweeney's piece to think about presidential brawl brackets. (#1 seed Andrew Jackson wins, by the way.) It's not such a stretch to think of presidents in the melee scenario, once you start--and especially once you realize that each one of them had to smack down a variety of foes just to get to that cushy seat in the Oval Office. Some

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-4797159766352614982010-02-23T23:49:00.007-05:002010-02-24T01:30:33.846-05:00

So here's something I never thought I'd say (or write): I was reading an interview with Danielle Steel in USA Today.It was tied into her new book, Big Girl, in which the main character "struggles with her weight, body image and self-esteem from childhood through her 20s." Okay. If there's a cheesy romance to be found in any subject, chances are Danielle Steel will dig it out. But as I read

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-91363312543919905442010-02-22T19:51:00.005-05:002010-02-22T20:26:43.562-05:00

Good news, everyone! David Remnick is going to write an Obama biography. Sounds like interesting stuff: private interviews, historical research, the signature Remnick writing style. Should be a good read, if probably not the next Game Change. The New York Times tells us all about it.But...what's this? At the bottom? In sheepish "Correction" italics?An earlier version of this post misquoted

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-69042629567068981072010-02-01T22:12:00.005-05:002010-02-07T21:04:58.076-05:00

Joey: Uh, Rach? These...these little women...Rachel: Yeah?Joey: How little are they? I mean, are they, like, scary little?Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was one of my favorites as a kid. I knew it was kinda hokey even then, but I loved the sweet, wholesome New Englandness of it. Why didn't I have Lincoln-supporting, all-knowing parents who steered us through genteel poverty with a smile

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-76564237036449139372010-01-19T23:44:00.006-05:002010-01-20T01:55:51.074-05:00

Back when I was in middle school, I found Sue Grafton's "alphabet series" in the Mystery section of the local library, and fell in love. (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, etc. Though being the rebel that I am, I think I started with "C.") Somewhere in the binge, I decided to use one of the books for an oral book report for Reading class. It wasn't until halfway through my presentation that I

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-85698483673732926102010-01-10T22:22:00.011-05:002010-06-30T23:51:16.993-04:00

So there's this writer. He was brilliant, restless, and died young while trying to maintain both his creativity and a stable life. Sounds familiar, right?Not so fast. The troubled writer in question here is the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano. His novel The Savage Detectives (as translated by Natasha Wimmer) was the most recent book club book, chosen as much for its unique perspective on

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-84373458572005582692010-01-02T12:15:00.002-05:002010-01-05T09:46:01.619-05:00

I believe in radio omens. Or these days, given that I rarely listen to the radio, iPod omens. Like, if I'm feeling nostalgic for the zaniness of college, my iPod turns up that song that happened to be playing in the background at Spring Weekend 2002. Even this morning, I was on the subway, thinking about how much has changed in the past few months, and the Whiny Frat Rock song that dominated my

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-79473145200061741932009-12-13T23:13:00.004-05:002009-12-13T23:19:52.478-05:00

I don't know why, but I always kind of assumed that David Sedaris's reading taste (at least the public one) would be considerably more esoteric than mine. Then I saw his bit in The New Yorker blog discussing his 2009 favorites. Among them was the Lorrie Moore novel (as on everybody's end-of-year list, it seems)--but also two other books I really want to read, the upcoming Joshua Ferris novel and

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-57016639069871013692009-12-04T22:38:00.004-05:002009-12-04T23:15:23.175-05:00

Once again, the New York Times has rated its top 10 books of the year. Once again, I've read exactly one of them.The 100 most notable books? I've read three. This is about status quo, though I still feel guilty. However, a quick check of the handy book spreadsheet confirms that I've actually read far more current-release books than usual this year--I guess I'm just not reading the right ones.

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-50029685385035395602009-12-01T23:10:00.008-05:002009-12-02T01:13:11.972-05:00

So for the last three Philip Roth books, I've talked/written about the endangered author syndrome among the mid-20th century luminaries, where they're working on a long goodbye/capstone to seal the legacy. And when it came to proving my theory, Roth was the proviest of them all. The Plot Against America = meditation on his childhood. Everyman = dying New Jerseyan reflecting on his life. Exit

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-21737120650489598312009-11-15T20:28:00.006-05:002009-11-16T11:59:49.346-05:00

Having fallen way behind on New Yorkers, I spent a good chunk of time this weekend plowing through. Most pieces were status quo, but I thought that the fiction has been especially good lately. This one in particular, "Alone" by Yiyun Lee, has been haunting me since I read it. It's beautifully written and structured--really, a complete novel in four pages. (I hope all the people trying to

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-27396035630716814502009-11-08T22:38:00.005-05:002009-11-09T00:18:23.559-05:00

Apparently I've been on a sex, drugs, and brutality kick lately--but only with the reading list, don't worry. After reading the first two Stieg Larsson thrillers (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire), I snuck Evil at Heart into the queue. Evil at Heart is Chelsea Cain's third book about Portland detective Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell, after

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-26328682343364087872009-11-01T22:23:00.005-05:002009-11-02T20:47:39.122-05:00

Americans like Swedish things. Those little meatballs with gravy and jam. Incomprehensible Muppets. Our Ektorp sofas from IKEA. And now, possibly the year's unlikeliest bestseller, the English translation of late Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson's book Män som hatar kvinnor.Written as the first book in a trilogy of brutal suspense thrillers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts with Mikael

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-74963475926035167002009-11-01T18:19:00.003-05:002009-11-01T18:47:07.974-05:00

One of my favorite "why didn't I know this guy before?" literary discoveries this year has been Colson Whitehead. And this morning's Times Sunday Book Review has a great, funny essay by him: What to Write Next.Realism: Take this test. When you read “These dishes have been sitting in the sink for days,” do you think (a) This is an indicator of my inner weather, or (b) Why don’t they do the

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-5838531379632220412009-09-27T13:56:00.006-04:002009-09-28T09:50:29.042-04:00

I've noticed that publishing memoirs (or thinly veiled fiction) are rarely inspirational. Instead, they're more of a paean to the horrors of the industry. When I first read Another Life in grad school, I thought it was quaint. Surely things had calmed down in the industry since the mid-twentieth century. Then I actually started working in NYC publishing, and discovered how accurate it still was.

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-78917257661004237132009-08-27T19:55:00.004-04:002009-08-28T01:52:50.434-04:00

So the dirty little secret of the Jacob & Katy book club is that occasionally, we read books that are popular for timely reasons. Most of the time, we go out of our way to pick either unusual or uncommon books. But it doesn't always work out that way. We did Light in August around the same time Oprah picked it, and Infinite Jest right after David Foster Wallace died. Because when is Faulkner

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-9267340827001993822009-08-25T21:12:00.003-04:002009-08-26T00:37:35.955-04:00

Ah, to be young, American, and idealistic in...Budapest. Wait. Is that right? Probably not. Anyway, that's the basic premise of Arthur Phillips's novel Prague. (You might think said novel would take place in the titular city, but you'd be wrong.)The book follows five young expats in Budapest in the early 90s, right after the Velvet Revolution, and right before Czech shed Oslovakia. There's

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-67747692716348500242009-08-20T00:30:00.003-04:002009-08-20T01:07:24.083-04:00

So I haven't yet gotten around to writing up Arthur Phillips' Prague (the next book club book may have come and gone by then--eep!), but in the meantime I should share an article that MTL passed along: Dancing About Architecture. In it, Phillips muses about how to approach music through writing.I like his points about the risks of inserting music into narrative, particularly the idea that "the

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-66365152408105034662009-08-09T15:15:00.002-04:002009-08-09T15:36:23.334-04:00

So yesterday I bought a copy of Netherland by Joseph O'Neill at Borders. On it was a big red sticker proclaiming President Obama's adoration for the novel. (For the record, I'm not reading it because he did--but Jacob, if you're reading this, I think we should use this as an opportunity to invite Mr. Obama to join the book club. B&J&K book club has a nice ring to it.)Anyway, I found the

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-55224149777765359472009-07-07T00:41:00.008-04:002009-07-07T01:53:20.678-04:00

The other day, I told someone that I don't cry when I read something sad. That's mostly true--but as with just about everything else, there's an exception. Lorrie Moore has managed to beat my heartlessness twice. First was her short story "People Like That Are the Only People Here." Next was her new, upcoming novel A Gate at the Stairs (thanks, BEA!). Moore is great, better than any author I've

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-22099829413524144422009-06-30T21:15:00.007-04:002009-07-01T01:43:48.462-04:00

Back in early December, Lisa, Myles and I had a conversation about which works of classic literature could be improved by the presence of zombies. My favorite idea, of course, was The Great Gatsby, with Gatsby crawling out of the pool looking for brains and revenge. None of us had any idea that any such book was in the works--just a shared fascination with zombies.I am definitely not a sci-fi

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-92092605306609650412009-06-23T20:41:00.006-04:002009-06-30T20:50:14.698-04:00

After reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, I needed to read something considerably less wholesome. Good news--I found it! More specifically, I found it in Aravind Adiga's Man Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger.Now, The White Tiger comes not only with a prized pedigree--it's also got fans in some of the toughest review venues: The Times (both London and New York),

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-73721639485250525842009-06-17T23:15:00.005-04:002009-06-18T00:00:12.407-04:00

You know what takes balls? Writing a fluff book about WWII atrocities (Tom Brokaw not included). But somehow, in the novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, authors Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows pull it off.Guernsey is written entirely in the form of 1946 letters to and from Juliet Ashton, a writer who's become famous by fictionalizing her WWII experiences in London as "

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-48428514685967820002009-06-10T21:47:00.005-04:002009-06-11T07:20:17.854-04:00

So Ragtime was the 13th (we think) entry in the Jacob-Katy book club. What's more summery and patriotic than y'know, the "Maple Leaf Rag," and ice cream socials, and Americanized last names streaming into New York from Ellis Island?Okay, so the book doesn't actually talk about...well, any of those things, really. But E. L. Doctorow's novel is set in the freewheeling ragtime era of the U.S.--

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-69211042342789578182009-06-02T19:51:00.004-04:002009-06-03T00:09:58.254-04:00

There aren't many landmark times in the book publishing landscape these days. There's Big Tweener Book Release, which gets twelve-year-old-girls to show up at Barnes & Noble at midnight. There's Fraud Unveiling Day, when Oprah and various bloggers have to eat crow after supporting the latest genocide survivor/celebrity parent who turns out to have defrauded everyone. And then there's BEA--

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-66132009301032494062009-05-26T22:16:00.006-04:002009-05-27T09:49:50.908-04:00

Standup comedy in New York has gone the way of everything else that was cool in the city in the 1970s: expensive, mainstream, and rigidly branded. But if you go to Comic Strip Live on the Upper East Side, on a Friday evening around 6, you see something different from the bland, two-drink-minimum efficiency of Caroline's in Times Square.A pint-sized whirlwind of wry energy, simultaneously busting

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-34572012030410734842009-04-14T00:05:00.003-04:002009-04-14T00:58:53.684-04:00

E.B. White is an evil, evil man. Not only did he kill Charlotte, he's been giving bum advice to impressionable young undergrads. But don't worry--a pretentious Cambridge grammarian will save us all!Choice excerpt: So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-39598670798227037162009-03-01T21:41:00.008-05:002009-03-02T18:28:42.856-05:00

New Yorkers love talking about New York. It's a fact. Anyone can write a travelogue of London, or Chicago, or Rome. But New Yorkers trust only themselves to do it for NYC. That's part of what makes this kind of navel-gazing travel lit so special: the writers who live here are more than a little in love with their surroundings, and it shows. It's not the shallow love you feel for Hawaii, or

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-71332114830722110662009-02-15T20:45:00.008-05:002009-02-16T00:55:51.687-05:00

Last night was the inaugural New Yorker Speakeasy, a new series of literary cabaret nights sponsored by the magazine. Given the date, the theme was "Love is Strange." I'm not so sure love was strange last night, so much as intellectualized and neuroticized to the point of no return. Luckily, that's the kind of love I have tons of experience with, so I had a great time.There was about an hour

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-13496599552966720862009-02-07T17:09:00.005-05:002009-02-07T20:26:53.013-05:00

The recent Updike tributes, in the New Yorker and other magazines, were great reminders of his work outside of the Rabbits and the Witches--like an excerpt from one of my favorite sports pieces ever, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." Updike introduced me to a Fenway Park I never knew, but wish I did: Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will;

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-81961372259405880882009-02-01T20:35:00.008-05:002009-02-02T22:43:37.952-05:00

Even before the sad news on Tuesday, I'd been thinking about John Updike lately. And Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, and all the other Angsty Young Man writers of years past. I recently finished reading Americana, Don DeLillo's first novel, and it's very much in the vein of those others. Glib dude seeks self, seeks tail, seeks less glibness.Americana follows David Bell, a successful

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-58021191054229606032009-01-22T22:49:00.003-05:002009-01-22T23:58:54.543-05:00

Remember how in the 80s, Cabbage Patch dolls would come with little adoption certificates? And you'd have a good feeling, 'cause you were saving some adorable, chubby-cheeked urchin from a life of drudgery, picking cabbage leaves or whatever? Well, I don't have a Cabbage Patch Kid anymore (little Oliver Wendell is languishing somewhere in my parents' attic, I think), but I've found something

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-71025268064315221452009-01-20T18:37:00.009-05:002009-01-21T12:05:50.418-05:00

We live in a post-superhero world. Today's presidential events aside, as a society we seem to be past the need for a cool dude--wrapped in American determination and blessed with superb ass-kicking kills--to sweep in and dispose of our street crime. We've got bigger problems.The interesting thing about Watchmen, a limited-series DC comic, is that its creator saw this coming--23 years ago. Now

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-40196834600224049292009-01-18T17:33:00.001-05:002009-01-18T17:36:44.877-05:00

Sometimes I like to pretend that I'm cool and literary. If I had more time and money, this double identity would involve reading magazines like n+1 and The Paris Review, and being familiar with the hip new short story writers. But I have neither time nor cash, so I depend on Dave Eggers's Best American Nonrequired Reading every year to fill the gap.But the collection has been disappointing in

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-19497451924537979932009-01-04T21:04:00.007-05:002009-06-08T20:46:56.162-04:00

Depending on which book you count as the first, Infinite Jest was number 11 in the Jacob-Katy book club. And it was a doozy. We've had our share of long, complicated ones (Ulysses, Bleak House), but this one was definitely the unwieldiest. Yet it may have been the most rewarding, in terms of sheer accomplishment. Between the two of us, we dragged the book across several continents (him), and

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-85191180064300985272008-12-30T11:05:00.006-05:002008-12-30T11:37:26.960-05:00

Y'know, if I thought that the Times would publish personal essays about embarrassing public puking incidents, I would have submitted about ten pieces a long time ago.Once again, Sloane Crosley beats me to the (spiked) punch. Letting the Chips Fall

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-78188977815599606442008-12-28T22:35:00.005-05:002008-12-29T16:52:49.540-05:00

As I get older, and my years of hardcore television-watching start to catch up to me, I admit that my attention span is shot. If entertainment isn't broken down into manageable chunks, I whine and drag my feet like a third-grader faced with long division homework. So I've determined that short stories/essays are pretty much the ideal literary format. When magazines like The New Yorker make an

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-88599053297345546392008-12-18T21:36:00.005-05:002008-12-19T00:27:14.805-05:00

So you're the President-elect. Your advisors say you need to pander to the people in the heartland who are half-convinced you're going to take your oath on the Koran, so you need a megachurch-foundin', Prop 8-supportin' pastor to show everyone how much you love Jesus. Check! Who's left to charm? Oh, yeah, those Hillary chicks. I know! Why don't you pick someone who writes about vaginas to

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-89346505067980576312008-12-16T22:29:00.004-05:002008-12-16T23:03:15.854-05:00

I think I have a crush on Alex Ross from the New Yorker. I always enjoyed his pieces in the magazine, but never really thought much about him beyond "pleasant subway reading." But then today, I was reading last week's piece on Leonard Bernstein, and just really loved his lush, descriptive language and style: "To attend the Bernstein festival night after night was to watch this man’s sometimes

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-50758353585150682222008-12-07T23:03:00.004-05:002008-12-07T23:46:53.971-05:00

Good news, everyone! The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2008 is out, and I've actually read one of them! That's about the same as I was doing at this time last year, so yay for maintenance. (The numbers look, umm, less good if you take into account that I've read only two of the top 100 notable books of the year, but hey, who's counting? Chances are I'll get to Toni Morrison and Fareed

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-6655293463547913682008-10-31T11:35:00.002-04:002008-10-31T12:38:45.287-04:00

This time of year, I always make it a special point to read "The Raven." Part of it is that Poe has always been shoved down our throats as a horror writer (though I've always found him more sad than creepy), but really because it's such a good autumnal poem. It's cold and bleak and lonely--yeah, November!Also, possibly the best thing ever (at least today): Christopher Walken reads "The Raven."

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-45198404544347644062008-10-05T16:17:00.007-04:002008-10-06T12:59:11.425-04:00

Sheryl and I had the following text message conversation today:K: I def just brushed up against Salman Rushdie.S: Whoa. Where?K: New Yorker Festival HQ.S: It's like our version of a strip club.And she's right. I'd pick a pretentious book event over Chippendales any night of the week. Maybe next year I'll stock up on $1 bills, in case there are really cute hipster writers around.Anyway,

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-17906271225453927932008-09-18T20:18:00.008-04:002008-09-18T23:32:21.314-04:00

Curtis Sittenfeld is pretty smart. After two novels which critics and readers alike proclaimed to be autobiographical, she came up with a way to make sure no one thinks her third one is about her: she made it about Laura Bush. Throw in some steamy President-on-First-Lady action, and no one's going to be talking about Curtis the Protagonist.On tour for American Wife, Sittenfeld gave a reading

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-51028962839743512812008-09-14T20:22:00.006-04:002008-09-15T10:14:02.798-04:00

What if Israel had collapsed shortly after inception in 1948, and European Jews had relocated to a reservation of sorts in Alaska? And what if, 60 years later, the U.S. was about to say, "Hey, sorry, we want our land back. You don't have to go home, but you've gotta get the hell out so we can let our own natives play house for a while"? You'd have the right mix of events for Michael Chabon's

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-70271581640389742042008-09-07T00:20:00.006-04:002008-09-07T02:27:44.734-04:00

You know how in real life, serial killers always end up being unattractive loners, or balding middle managers? Thank goodness for the literary world. A suave Manhattanite who knows how to use rats and cheese in the most horrific way possible? A vinophile cannibal with a taste for FBI agents? Yes, please!Gretchen Lowell, in Chelsea Cain's novel Heartsick, may top them all. Not only is she

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-88753785329787467952008-08-25T23:50:00.003-04:002008-08-26T00:29:35.338-04:00

"Orwell would be rolling in his grave." "This policy is Orwellian." "I don't like this, so I'm going to call it Orwellian." George Orwell's name is pretty broadly abused in the punditry world, thanks to 1984. So we can safely assume that Orwell, if he had a blog today, would be a political blogger, right? Wrong! He's a navel-gazing minutiae blogger, just like the rest of us. The University

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-31770892015715255822008-08-21T23:44:00.003-04:002008-09-07T02:26:38.235-04:00

One day you're in college, reading The Sun Also Rises and thinking, "Hey, Brett Ashley's got a pretty sweet deal." Then, suddenly you're 27, reading The Sun Also Rises again, and realizing that somehow, instead of breaking expat hearts from Paris to Barcelona, you've become Jake Barnes instead. *sigh*Anyway, I picked up The Sun Also Rises again in anticipation of hanging out in Key West,

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-18760056004172737042008-08-06T22:10:00.007-04:002008-08-07T16:41:08.863-04:00

Joyce Carol Oates is the Law & Order of the literary world. "But," you protest (why must you always protest?), "she's one of our most accomplished writers. She writes ridiculously academic reviews in NYROB. She's the Vegas favorite to win the National Book Award every year. How could she possibly be like the sensationalistic Law & Order?" Because beneath the fancy prose, the deft

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-85292104663859070512008-07-28T20:40:00.007-04:002008-07-29T00:38:03.230-04:00

A few weeks ago, I knew Anthony Bourdain mostly as the bad-boy TV foodie who eviscerated Top Chef contestants, and the guy responsible for the awesome mac and cheese at Les Halles. Now I know him as an entertaining writer and official cute boy magnet. To wit, a conversation I had on the subway while reading Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly:Cute guy: I see you're

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-81707603703980162012008-07-15T22:00:00.004-04:002008-07-15T23:28:50.430-04:00

If you're a memoirist and you're not eighty years old, chances are at some point that you're gonna run out of humorous life anecdotes. You've mined your childhood and your family. You've exposed the quirks of your friends. You've framed every traumatic event for comedic value. So what do you do then?If you're David Sedaris, you keep plugging along anyway. His latest book, When You Are

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-17289742990191965922008-07-06T23:25:00.010-04:002008-07-06T23:59:24.770-04:00

A few months ago, The Sportswriter protagonist Frank Bascombe kinda pissed me off, with his poor decisions and his even poorer relationships. This morning, I found his creator to be considerably more charming. Richard Ford was a featured segment on CBS Sunday Morning (the drowsy, pleasant alternative to the Chris Matthews-style browbeating on Sunday mornings).And it's hard not to like a guy who

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-60650853685473514642008-06-23T22:21:00.008-04:002008-06-24T01:31:43.192-04:00

When I was a really young kid, my dad worked shifts. And when he'd do overnight ones, he'd always come home at 7 in the morning, just as Sam and I were getting up and ready for school. Dad would always have something in hand when we swarmed him at the door--sometimes donuts (the sprinkled kind, of course), but more often comic books. I loved them. For me, Dad usually picked the girly ones.

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-42116822955651190382008-06-17T22:20:00.009-04:002008-06-18T01:02:47.683-04:00

On the back cover of On Beauty, there's a New York Times blurb: "wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed...a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane."You know, I never thought I'd agree with Michiko Kakutani, but....I really loved On Beauty. It might even be on the elusive list of favorites. At the very least, it's near the top of the book club picks

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-27849998606635739922008-06-04T21:10:00.004-04:002008-06-04T23:09:07.258-04:00

"If you read a story in Esquire and don't like it, there might be something wrong with the story. If you read a story in the New Yorker and don't like it, there's something wrong with you."Tonight I saw David Sedaris kick off his latest book tour at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square. This is a victory, make no mistake. I have been trying for years to see Sedaris read live. There's always

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-77560474479356735502008-05-29T19:08:00.006-04:002008-06-02T22:37:09.345-04:00

Disclaimer: I am very much a product of go-go 80s Reaganaut commercialism. I owned the Rainbow Brite dolls created by Hallmark. I nagged my mom to get whichever sugary cereal had the best cartoon mascot. I drank the Kool-Aid--literally!So maybe that's part of why White Noise, the latest Jacob-Katy book club selection, didn't reach me as deeply as it should have. As a criticism of America's

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-35924468484528696362008-05-24T18:34:00.005-04:002008-05-27T16:59:45.402-04:00

So continuing our new hobby of Timely Literary Jaunts, SPG and I caught a reading by Sloane Crosley (whom you may remember from last week, or, umm, right below, if this is still on the main blog page). She and Keith Gessen were speaking at Court Books in Brooklyn, in support of their respective first books. It didn't do much to dispel the theory that we could totally be writing and promoting

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-8925143962454721692008-05-19T21:59:00.005-04:002008-05-27T16:57:21.227-04:00

I put a lot of thought into various "what-if" scenarios--especially morbid, what-happens-if-I'm-hit-by-a-bus-today ones. (Not that this stops me from leaving my bed unmade some mornings, or stuffing yet another bag of junk in my closet.) I like to think it's part of my unique charm. So imagine the intrigue when I started reading Sloane Crosley's new collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-23868701265452644812008-05-11T22:35:00.007-04:002008-05-12T17:37:55.352-04:00

Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Indian-Americans. It's a fact. And a lot of critics (as well as one audience member at her Strand reading two weeks ago) take issue with it. Such a lovely writer...why restrict herself to a small subset of people and circumstances? But what they all seem to overlook is that she uses Bengalis in the way Faulkner uses residents of Yoknapatawpha County--the repetition

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-10440515182821294522008-05-04T20:05:00.006-04:002008-05-04T22:42:01.039-04:00

This morning, I watched Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia do the book publicity song-and-dance on Tim Russert's show. He took questions about his judicial philosophy, and tried hard to behave himself. It felt strange. As a kid, all I knew of the Court was what I saw in snippets on the nightly news: confirmation hearings, swearings-in, and stock footage of Anita Hill. Never any selling or

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-12497788394323037832008-04-30T22:45:00.000-04:002008-05-01T00:57:49.379-04:00

Did I say that the Strand was dead to me? I...lied. Sort of. We're still on a break, but I can go when there's a cool event, right? Like a reading by Jhumpa Lahiri, who's been a favorite writer since aught-three.Having discovered recently that we have the exact same taste in books, Sheryl and I took our book buddy-ness to Union Square after work for the reading. We were way early (it's

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-72349597988997607362008-04-15T20:14:00.003-04:002008-04-15T20:53:23.019-04:00

Because I'm still in the midst of a reading binge, I've got a different kind of review for now: bookstore. More specifically, the Strand--home to "18 miles of books," except of course the books you want. The Strand is officially on notice!It takes a lot for me to denounce (and/or reject) an independent bookstore. But the Strand has failed me repeatedly in the following ways:1. They never

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-75718151923593776522008-04-09T23:15:00.006-04:002008-04-10T00:42:23.935-04:00

Sleep and I don't have the best relationship. I know we should spend more time together--in fact, we should be hanging out right now. Sometimes it's just so hard to make the schedules work. However, despite our problems, I don't know what I'd do without sleep.That's what makes the subject of the nonfiction book The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery so horrifying. The titular

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-13923303096099198592008-03-28T19:18:00.007-04:002008-03-29T14:45:25.771-04:00

"That's the stupidest story I ever heard, and I've read the entire Sweet Valley High series." -- Moe SzyslakSweet Valley High is back! And it's got a Gossip Girl makeover. I'm not really pissed that they're making the Wakefield twins a size thinner, or that the girls will drive a Jeep instead of a Fiat. But I'm ticked that they're upgrading it at all. The series is a fantastic representative

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-8199132308977665702008-03-27T21:10:00.006-04:002008-03-28T20:47:08.465-04:00

Once you've mastered all the knowledge in the world (or at least all the knowledge in the encyclopedia), where do you go from there? Well, if you're AJ Jacobs, Esquire writer and all-around infopreneur, you go for the biggest book of all: the Bible. Jacobs decided to follow up his encyclopedic memoir The Know-It-All with an even more intense test of the academic spirit and his wife's patience:

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-39538484377911186252008-03-20T23:29:00.000-04:002008-03-21T01:01:09.094-04:00

At tonight's taping of The Daily Show, I was thinking about what a boon Jon Stewart has been for the publishing industry. In between the Doris Kearns Goodwins and the Tom Brokaws who turn up to push their books, there are more obscure authors whose books on the Teapot Dome scandal or Mary Todd Lincoln would never get any play anywhere but C-Span2 on weekends. I wondered whether these books see a

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-27863040513256269802008-03-02T21:44:00.008-05:002008-03-10T09:40:46.888-04:00

If Freud was right, and all women really do have penis envy, I'm pretty sure I've been cured of that by modern American literature. Between the Rabbit Angstroms and the Nathan Zuckermans and now the Frank Bascombes, I am eternally thankful that I will never be a middle-aged man.Based on recommendations from friends, Jacob and I picked Richard Ford's The Sportswriter as our latest book club

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-60594921133204861022008-01-22T22:09:00.006-05:002008-03-10T09:45:10.707-04:00

One of my goals for 2008 is to read more poetry. So far, I'm not doing so well....I've got a new volume of rock 'n roll-themed poetry--foreword by Bono!--sitting on my shelf, and it's not exactly burning its way to the top of my queue. But I was watching the awesome Ovation channel the other day, and caught a half-hour profile of Allen Ginsberg. Talking about his final years, it featured a

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-27777950552876153272008-01-06T19:41:00.000-05:002008-01-07T00:44:11.142-05:00

Back in the old days of aught-six, I read a book which (I presumed) represented some of the most extreme wordplay junkies: Crossworld. Now, thanks to Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, the crossword enthusiasts look like like slacker hobbyists. In Stefan Fatsis's memoir/immersion research piece, he examines the small,

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-38674548580575109432007-12-30T13:58:00.000-05:002008-01-02T21:13:55.415-05:00

The last Katy-Jacob book club pick for 2007 was Last Exit to Brooklyn. It was also the latest entry in my own reading mini-theme for 2007, "Pre-Giuliani New York was so much more interesting."The book is a collection of semi-connected stories. The biggest link is the geography: the same rough neighborhood of Brooklyn, 1950s-ish. The other connection is the repetition of certain characters,

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-56503328237440555442007-12-26T20:05:00.000-05:002007-12-28T09:58:18.671-05:00

The Best American books have become one of the best rackets in publishing. I used to stand in the bookstores at year's end, and be guilted into the idea that I hadn't read nearly enough good essays/sportswriting/short stories throughout the year. Then, when the series grew to about fifty different books every November, I gave up on the guilt-induced buying. Best American Poetry by Monkeys

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-87786632553952706652007-12-19T23:04:00.000-05:002007-12-19T23:48:07.352-05:00

Woody Allen the director makes concessions to modernity. He casts Will Ferrell, has (finally) stopped casting himself as the romantic lead, and seems to have moved beyond the New York of the 1970s. Woody Allen the writer, not so much. Sure, he makes the occasional reference to the internet, or comments on modern food insanity. But for the most part, his prose is pretty much the same it's been

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-65385502599812044972007-11-18T19:23:00.000-05:002007-11-18T19:52:45.493-05:00

"Mailer had always thought it senseless to undertake an attack unless you made certain it was printed, for otherwise you were left with a determined enemy who was an unmarked man, and therefore able to repay you at leisure and by the lift of an eyebrow."When I saw Norman Mailer speak at Harvard earlier this year, he was awfully frail. When he canceled his scheduled part in October's New Yorker

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-80156619261434336892007-11-11T21:05:00.000-05:002007-11-11T23:12:03.893-05:00

People have been predicting what the Writers Guild members would do during the strike...humor columns, illicit scripts, blogs. Most of the guesses were jokes, and it looks like that in less than a week, pretty much all were right. My heart goes out to these guys--especially when Rachel Axler says, "But we’ve given up our salaries and our jobs — easily the only jobs we’re qualified for — to

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-44104865240964462162007-11-06T19:54:00.000-05:002007-11-06T23:47:16.711-05:00

Junior year of college, I had an American Lit professor who seemed positively insane. He'd rant and rave about the inherent pornography of narrative, and tie everything somehow to sex and primal urges. On the morning of September 11, he kept us cooped up in the TV-less classroom, and railed for an hour about how we (as a generation) had been given an amazing historical opportunity. So yeah.

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-51158462297507109282007-10-20T12:54:00.000-04:002007-10-22T00:51:44.922-04:00

Elaine: Yeah. I met this lawyer...we went out to dinner...I had the lobster bisque...we went back to my place, yada yada yada. I never heard from him again.Jerry: But you yada yada'd over the best part.Elaine: No, I mentioned the bisque.Anyway, what does Seinfeld have to do with books, you ask? Well, you may have seen Mrs. Seinfeld, erstwhile socialite and current Friend of Oprah, on all the TV

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-20267412743624870202007-10-10T19:59:00.000-04:002007-10-10T20:24:57.294-04:00

Okay, so if you didn't go out and read Then We Came to the End because I liked it, you should go out and read it because the National Book Award committee liked it! I'm just sayin'....I'm glad to see it getting the props--it was easily one of my favorite books of the past year. Had I not heard about it beforehand, I never would have guessed it was a first novel. And I find myself hearing

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-83841657090354093162007-09-29T23:14:00.000-04:002007-10-02T12:22:39.304-04:00

The first time I heard about Prep, someone was talking about it in my book editing class, and describing it as a guilty pleasure kind of book. So I was really expecting something like the Gossip Girl series, a slick package of gratuitous teen bitchery and sex. [Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the series, but having seen a few minutes of the new CW show, I don't think my assessment is far off.]

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-15139532924213652572007-09-16T19:38:00.000-04:002007-09-16T21:45:25.171-04:00

So today was the second annual Brooklyn Book Festival. Taking place in picturesque downtown between Borough Hall and the courthouse, it was basically a big jumble of publishers hawking books, authors hawking themselves, and nobody hawking fair food (to Jacob's discontent).The booths were unspectacular. It's always good to see little presses working hard to stay alive, but it's hard to get

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-24304302206759177822007-09-15T23:26:00.000-04:002007-09-16T01:08:13.138-04:00

I'm not sure how I avoided reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn the past many years, or why I always assumed it was one of those sentimental kids' books about plucky orphans (no offense, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). Whatever was going on in my warped and biased little mind, it was wrong. I received a copy of the book as a going-away present from Serena--and I should have figured out then that if my

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-58715392808072791362007-09-11T22:16:00.000-04:002007-12-31T01:43:50.349-05:00

This summer contained reason #649 why I'm baffled that Jacob continues to put up with me. I say I want to read Dickens for our little book club. He says sure. I pick Bleak House, the 12-hour miniseries of which he's already sat through. He's still game. I find out the book is over 900 pages. He buys a copy. I'm pretty sure most people would have opted out by then.But outside of his good

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31982522.post-52850983238300139072007-08-14T17:52:00.000-04:002007-09-04T20:33:48.354-04:00

Before I left Boston, my former boss John tried to "scare" me about New York publishing by invoking Bright Lights, Big City. And when I did leave, his going-away present was a copy of the book--though at that point I think it was less of a cautionary tale than an in-joke and a field guide for what not to do in the fast city. Unfortunately for John, I took less from the book about life lessons

Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541095972320111546noreply@blogger.com2